Results matching “holy sons emil”

It's almost Valentine's Day! You know, that holiday manufactured to remind those of us who are in relationships we shouldn't take the love we have for granted and to rub it in for the single folks that they're going to be spending another February 14th alone.

Whether you're on your own out there or spending the 30th Valentine's Day with your sweetheart, we here at Spectrum Culture have decided to pick our 10 favorite indie love songs from the past decade. The requirements? The song had to come out between 2000-09 and could not be on a label owned by a major. I hope you enjoy our selections. And remember: love does not exclusively exist between a man and a woman. Sorry, Sarah Palin. - David Harris


10. "No One's Gonna Love You," Band of Horses, from Cease to Begin [Sub Pop; 2007]

Band of Horses sticks with a tried and true, borderline emotionally abuse angle on "No One's Gonna Love You," playing up the title line just a little more than the "more than I do" that follows. It's a classic love-song approach, cornering the object of affection with a "this is the best you're ever going to get" approach, one that's furthered here by the soothing repetition of the line. The band further pads this attack with a steady stream of vague, pretty poetry, invocations of external danger that range from "we're reeling through an endless fall" to "the whole thing's tumbling down." This corners the beloved even more. Yet all this structural mumbo jumbo is kind of forgettable in what amounts to a consistently entrancing song. A shimmering, half-buried guitar line and some whispery drums float along on a silky wave. The soft musical touch gives the song a new identity away from its lyrical bent, portraying a forceful imprecation that's also a cooing, feathery paean to devotion. Otherwise clunky lines like "we are the ever-living ghost of what once was" seem elegiac and workable under its sheen. Even lead singer Ben Bridwell's too-reedy whine melts away under its hypnotic rhythm. - Jesse Cataldo


9. "A Stone," Okkervil River, from Black Sheep Boy [Jagjaguwar; 2005]

The protagonist in Simon & Garfunkel's "I Am a Rock," one of the most well-known uses of personification in pop music, built "a fortress deep and mighty that none may penetrate." He disdained laughter, love, friendship and pain; it is implied that it was an old flame that left him so very isolated and emotionless. Okkervil River's Will Sheff threw a twist into this bleak parable on "A Stone," from 2005's Black Sheep Boy. The down-on-his-luck central character is, instead, a man who is obsessively infatuated with the woman who happens to love that dull, inanimate object, making the story all the more heartbreaking. It is clearly not a love song in the "God Only Knows" sense, but it works as one on several complex layers, some genuinely romantic and others, well, depressing. While the object of affection here still loves that damn stone, smooth and cold, we find the narrator going "fucking insane" over the fact that she seems to want something so much more alive and real.

The final three verses feature the stone dreaming of medieval times, with the love interest becoming a princess being courted by numerous suitors, only to choose a "knave" from long ago. Sheff's ability to layer metaphor upon dream upon fairy tale upon metaphor is equally romantic, heart-wrenching and brilliant, accompanied by an especially teary tone of voice and some tasteful horns to wrap it all up. It is left ambiguous what the stone actually represents - an uninteresting or closed-off lover, a gravestone or any other obsession keeping these two apart - but anyone who has never experienced rejection because of someone or something so dull and minute may need to be taken to a petrologist. - Kyle Wall


8. "Falling Slowly," the Swell Season, from the Swell Season [Overcoat Recordings; 2006]

What is it about the Irish? It's more than the accent -- there's an underlying sense of romanticism that colors melodies as well as vocal delivery itself. If Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova's "Falling Slowly" had been recorded entirely in Celtic (or Welsh or Finnish or Basque) it would still induce swoons, even in the most hard-hearted. It would be easy to dismiss the song for its popularity (it's pretty much the theme song to the movie Once, in case you forgot) if it didn't hit such an emotional bullseye. It's understated and vulnerable and hopeful -- exactly the same notes you find your heart singing as you slowly wake up to the fact that you're falling in love.

To be honest, I'm just now listening to the lyrics with a serious ear. And yes, they're swoon-worthy. But it's the overall effect -- a sense of destiny, mutual salvation and awakening -- that floats this boat. And the fact that it's a duet, sung by two souls who sound destined to gravitate toward each other in a beautiful, initially tentative but ultimately sure-footed way? All the Hallmark cards in the world couldn't even begin to capture that. - Barbara Mitchell


7. "Slow Show," The National, from Boxer [Beggars Banquet; 2007]

Readers might find "Slow Show" an unusual choice for this feature, and for good reason. Equal parts self-loathing, manic and beautiful, it's far from a traditional love song, even by modern indie standards. Still, it's one of the most tender and moving songs of the past decade: an understanding nod to all those confidence-devoid, regret-filled romantics whose idea of love exists only in shades of complex gray.

Matt Berninger's distinct baritone invokes the woes and longings of a truly pathetic character, filled with self-doubt and awkwardness ("A little more stupid/ A little more scared/ Every minute more unprepared") and seemingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Presumably alone at a party, the narrator nervously swallows punch, his mind racing and foggy, unable to concentrate or assimilate. Berninger delivers his lines ("Looking for somewhere to stand and stare/ I leaned on the wall and the wall leaned away") in a reserved yet desperate way that suggests nothing short of running home to his lover will help alleviate the fear and sense of not belonging that's wrecking him.

Though "Slow Show" is predominantly bleak, its closing lyrics ("You know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw you/ You know I dreamed about you/ I missed you for 29 years") suggest that the narrator's love is so pure and runs so deep that it's simply beyond time or logic. It's an atypical, emotional finish to an already emotional song that explores the comforts of love in a time of internal despair, and one of the most memorable love songs of the past decade. - Marcus David


6. "I Found a Reason," Cat Power, from the Covers Record [Matador; 2000]

As if to push her sparse musical approach to an extreme, Chan Marshall took the Velvet Underground's "I Found a Reason" and excised most of the lyrics, as if only part of the song evoked a particular sentiment for her- the only one worth repeating. Originally released on 1970's airplay-pining Loaded, Lou Reed's "I Found a Reason" sounds melancholy, shuffling along like Tim Hardin's similarly-named "Reason to Believe" while featuring a Dylanian harmonica, straight out of "I Want You."

Marshall, on the other hand, repeats the lines "What comes is better than what came before," sounding mournful and elegiac over warm, reverberating minor chords on her piano. "You better run, run, run to me," she insists, though it's unclear as to whether the object of her affection is already on his way or has left her far behind. Marshall, in her minimalism, leaves the song ambiguous, and as with all great love songs, the listener's urge to fill in the blanks with the personal becomes the perfect accompaniment. The fact that a two-minute cover can be so different from its original incarnation and perhaps provide more unanswered questions than its forbearer is a testament to Marshall, whose unique feel for a love song casts a shadow over the '00s so large, a million Zooey Deschanels could fit inside. - Chris Middleman


5. "First Day of My Life," Bright Eyes, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning [Saddle Creek; 2005]

I've read that Conor Oberst once introduced this song during a show with: "This is a love song. I myself have never been in love. But I imagine this is what it would be like." It's maybe hard to believe, but the track certainly stands out from the Bright Eyes catalog, anomalous in its uplifting optimism. Of course, there are still hints of melancholy buried in the subtle allusions to a rich back story of two lovers. "I'd rather be working for a pay check/ Than waiting to win the lottery," Oberst asserts in the closing verse, grounding the lofty optimism and adolescent clichés of other passages with a lucid, give-and-take study on this most-covered human emotion.

Oberst sure pours it on early, though. "Yours was the first face that I saw/ I think I was blind before I met you," he claims over acoustic swells that recall the great Elliott Smith. It's almost as dramatic as the title-lyric, "This is the first day of my life/ Glad I didn't die before I met you." On paper it's almost embarrassingly sappy, but somehow it works as an honest, stripped-down take on the transformative, restorative power of romantic love. Even without ever using the word "love," "First Day of My Life" is, from start to finish, the archetypal love song of the past decade--a wedding song for a new generation. In the hands of a lesser talent, this refrain could easily melt into revoltingly sticky-sweet corn syrup, but Oberst's undeniable talent as a wordsmith and his pitch-perfect trembling vocals leave it standing profoundly tall. - Brady Baker


4. "Such Great Heights," The Postal Service, from Give Up [Sub Pop; 2003]

Ben Gibbard writes almost exclusively about love - usually the dejected, despondent, why-don't-you-feel-the-same-way infatuated misery of love - but love nonetheless. However, on "Such Great Heights," all of that gloom is evacuated for an absolutely smitten rollicking of pure ecstasy. Musically, it's a fizzy cocktail of effusive synth, grumbling synth, shimmering synth and... actually, save for a late-game guitar beam, the entire song is made up of synth, which in 2003, before indie's wide-armed embrace of dance and all its little children, was quite a recitation.

But none of that matters when the chorus kicks in. "They won't see us waving from such great heights / Come down now they'll say / But everything looks perfect from far away / Come down now, but we'll stay." Sincere, adulating and utterly adorable, rare does a song sound as genuine as "Such Great Heights" does. People who pretend to hate this song because of yuppie stigma or UPS commercials will always, always be full of shit. Divorce thyself from the typecasting pessimists and take the track as it was meant - not just a perfect 'indie' love song, a perfect love song regardless of what context you assign it - and something Gibbard will probably never replicate. - Luke Winkie


3. "Fistful of Love," Antony and the Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now [Secretly Canadian; 2005]

Love isn't healthy. It's obsessive, too forgiving and ultimately frightening. As any indie with a pocketful of neuroses knows, that kind of love and music go together like nothing else. "Fistful of Love," one of the many stellar tracks on Antony & the Johnsons' sophomore album, I Am a Bird Now, is about exactly that kind of emotion. A piano and horn-driven song monologuing the weirdly touching devotion of a lover forgiving their abusive other, it's so radiant and convinced of its own rightness that it becomes easy to gloss over lyrics like "And I feel your fists/ And I know it's out of love/ And I feel the whip/ And I know it's out of love." Combined with mentor/idol/strange love icon Lou Reed's wandering, soulful guitar work and curiously contemplative spoken word intro, "Fistful of Love" accomplishes in a listener exactly what the singer is feeling- the rightness of something that should feel absolutely abhorrent.

Antony's voice is as powerful as its ever been on this track, trading in trills and warbles for nearly raspy, desperate shouts as he first learns to accept and then demands that kind of treatment, that kind of love from his lover. Love may be frightening, but it's what it can make us want that's the truly scary part. - Nathan Kamal


2. "Trapeze Swinger" by Iron & Wine, from Around the Well [Sub Pop; 2009]

Often, it's difficult to love someone completely. Finding and then maintaining those feelings can be a laborious task, and life has a way of testing the emotions and sentiments we hold most dear. This being the case, it's no surprise most love songs deal with the present, the past or a hope for the future - but not all three. "The Trapeze Swinger" is not one of those songs. Sam Beam's Iron & Wine explores love over a lifetime from fleeting glances to intimate moments, savage fights to dissolved relationships, fond memories to final evaluations of it all. It's a love song for the young and the experienced that graces familiar feelings for both.

Few other artists have the wise and careful demeanor of Beam's perpetual backwoods whisper; it's that delivery that anchors such grand sentiments over 10 ambitious minutes. Lesser artists would have failed to accurately express the lifelong scope of "The Trapeze Swinger" or do it less justice. Any other vocalist would have seemed too ambitious, singing from perspectives they couldn't possibly understand. But Iron & Wine ambitiously sings of love lost and gained, before and after the simple pleasures of life - and it's his simple approach that makes it all hit home. The songwriter's age isn't important when his voice suggests so much experience. In each stanza's plea for a lover to "Please, remember me" in any number of ways, Beam reinforces just how permanent and evolving love can be, whether or not those questions ever reach their destination. More importantly, he suggests those evolving emotional way-points and the moments that prompt them are what really matter. Because at the end, life is as much a collection of all those temporary love songs as the relationships that made them all so important. - Michael Merline


1. "Emily Kane," Art Brut, from Bang Bang Rock & Roll [Fierce Panda; 2005]

If you just read selected lyrics, it comes across like your typical ode to lost love ("I don't even know where she lives/ I've not seen her in 10 years..." or the impassioned chorus of "Other girls went and other girls came/ I can't get over my old flame/ I'm still in love with Emily Kane.") But what makes "Emily Kane" arguably the greatest indie rock love song of the last decade is Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos' delivery and attitude. Sure there's some humor there, but it's only to mask the fact that he's 100% sincere.

From the way the opening eight chords slide down the scale to the fevered repetition of the final choruses, "Emily Kane" sticks with you not just because it's a great pop song, but because it so vividly pines for a certain feeling at a certain time of life. What really makes it great is the fact that it's relatable; nearly everyone had some sort of infatuation at age 15 - unrequited or otherwise - and the thrill of that early romance is the newness of it. And that's half of what Argos is longing for: "Even though we didn't understand/ How to do much more than just hold hands/ There's so much about you I miss/ The clumsy way we used to kiss," he reminisces in his mostly-spoken style. Sure, it's a tribute to a real person, but more than that, it's a longing for something intangible - a little bit of nostalgia for a feeling that you basically only get once. - Aaron Passman
[Logos: Jason Stoff]

Holy Sons

Label: Important Records








Emil Amos's one man project, Holy Sons, is incredibly productive. Following the striking Drifter's Sympathy of earlier this year, his new Criminal's Return is not quite a spiritual sequel, so much as a thematic successor. The looming, paranoid production and unhinged spoken-word samples remain the same, as do the long instrumental stretches of distorted guitars and almost inaudible bass. It's nearly as affecting a record as Drifter's Sympathy, and certainly as memorable.

The record opens with a strange, hissing wind- it could be through trees or grass or the sea, only to be overtaken by the quiet, minimalist keyboards and wandering guitar of "From Now On." An immense organ line appears after the chorus- "Like every night is a wasted chance to change/ And every dawn, from now on-" and the song gains a sort of sad majesty, both melancholy and angry. One of the highlights of the album, "I'm Surrounded," utilizes the same twisted soundtrack samples from Drifter's Sympathy to the same eerie effect, until the repetitive bass and multi-tracked vocals create a dreamlike trance. Amos interrupts himself from multiple directions, all anchored by the insistent refrain "Everybody said/ Everybody said/ It's unattainable."

"Fermenting Mind" nearly repeats the trick, this time with guitars and programmed drums, and is saved from redundancy by spoken word interludes like "Time's just something the government made to control our minds. It doesn't exist." Holy Sons' albums are best listened to as complete, organic pieces, in which the small intricacies of the sound can be best appreciated; breaking the record up into pieces loses the shared depths of the individual songs. That said, the title track, divided into two parts, is jointly the weakest of the album, not quite as imposing, dark or complex as the rest. On the other hand, "Cruel + Unusual" is the closest thing Amos may have done yet to a pop song (at least under the Holy Sons moniker). Riding a nearly country-ish lope reminiscent of Isaac Brock in his gentler moments, sentiments like "But his boredom is no higher/ And I'm bored of his desires" sound prettier than they should.

Criminal's Return is a worthy successor to Drifter's Sympathy and a definite indication that quick production does not necessitate a decline in quality. If anything, I end up wanting Holy Sons to work faster and produce more.

by Nathan Kamal

Holy Sons's latest album, Drifter's Sympathy, is one of my favorite albums of the year so far, so imagine my glee when Emil Amos, the man behind the record, agreed to an interview with Spectrum Culture. Via email, he was kind enough to answer a few questions on his other projects, his parents, film tastes and how skateboarding is kind of like that scene in Star Wars when Han gets frozen in carbonite.


Holy Sons is a solo project of yours- you play all the instruments and composed all the songs. Is there a particular reason why you work alone on this project?

Different bands serve different parts of myself that sort of need to breathe... different ways of satisfying the need to rid myself of various psychological toxins and fulfilling a long-standing obligation to myself to get some serious work done. In college it started to dawn on me that the only way through the lethargy, absurdity and depression was to plow straight through it all by developing an old-fashioned work ethic. Holy Sons began so early that I barely notice the process of how the records exit my brain. It's a daily ritualistic recording reality that began almost 20 years ago. It's like breathing.

You've worked (and are working) with a number of different music groups and musicians in the past- Om and Grails come to mind. How are they different from Holy Sons?

Grails is a collective that, in ways, wasn't really meant to be but we pulled it up by it's bootstraps and saw it through at a very casual pace. Om came by surprise and completed the trinity of bands, helping to make music a real job, which, as something I'd avoided before, has improved a lot of the basic conditions of playing ...and it's like being a full-time drummer again... which is part of me coming back, full circle, to how I began playing as a kid. I didn't really play drums for almost 10 years through the '90s. On the one hand, now I've got more freedom to make music in my life but on the other I was pretty sure I had an ulcer when I woke up yesterday morning. Between the three bands music has become a sort of full-time religion.

What sort of music did you grow up around? How does it affect what you currently create?

My parents were old enough to be ground-floor hippies and my grandmother was an art critic for the Courier Journal, so we were always surrounded by art in some way. I was born in Coconut Grove/Miami FLA. To understand that kind of environment back then you should watch the documentary Cocaine Cowboys. There's also a lot of good books on the JM/Wave CIA station there, Havana and the mob's relationship to Miami, and Florida as a gateway of all sorts of crime that help describe the chaos and insidiousness of the place. My father knew all sorts of people like The Bee Gees and Hall and Oates and he hung pretty tight with Crosby, Stills and that crew. The Eagles, The Beatles, everyone had a house in Coconut Grove... it was sort of a secret, much smaller San Francisco in terms of being a birthing ground for the hippie lifestyle. My mom waited tables at the Mutiny, which is the main night club they mention in Cocaine Cowboys. She was waiting on Neil Young there when he wrote the lyrics to "Star of Bethlehem." The stories kind of go on and on. You might say it was a womb of the East Coast folk-rock scene and that's always been in my blood but by the time we moved to Chapel Hill I was becoming a teenager and got into hardcore and skateboarding, which was about my generation instead of theirs. In skateboarding they often say that once you become a skater you never truly leave it and hardcore seems to go hand in hand with that. I often picture skateboarding and hardcore crystallizing my mind as if I was 'carbon frozen' like Han Solo was in Star Wars. They gave me a platform for my incessant ranting, which is still in full effect. You can read books on periods or movements and you can dabble in hobbies but sometimes there is no substitute for actually being there in a place and time and really giving yourself to it.

Ok, here's an easy one- what sort of music do you listen to, when you're not listening to your own?

The CDs in my car right now are:

The Troggs- Singles

Heldon- Live '75-'79

Stelvio Cipriani- Solamente Nero

Scientist- Scientific Dub

Sebadoh- Wade Through the Boggs

Vangelis- Sex Power'

Holy Sons latest album, Drifter's Sympathy, is an eclectic record and you've mentioned German music in the '70s as a primary influence- how so? Also, Drifter's Sympathy is a highly thematic album- would you consider it a "concept" album?

I could probably say that experimental German music in the '70s has been the single biggest influence on my adult years of making records. As a kid, Holy Sons was dabbling in a strictly American vibe, you know...and I was proud of celebrating the dirt of homemade American punk and flying some sort of junkie freak flag for it. Starting with Decline of the West you can hear the German influence starting to clean the songs up, introduce more synthetic sounds and make them more efficient as a kind of pointed dagger to deliver their message. The loose concept of the title "Drifter's Sympathy" is from a re-enactment I saw as a kid after school one day on a crime show, something like "Real Stories of the Highway Patrol." I remember watching a lot of 'Superior Court' and real crime shows after school for some reason and certain re-enactments stuck in my head. In addition, I have some pretty bad memories of watching episodes of Cops on LSD. A top 3 after-school re-enactment high light list would be:

a) the time on Superior Court when a kid had accidentally drank Drano thinking it was orange juice... he had to take the stand with a voice-box whilst suing the company for packaging the Drano in a cardboard carton too similar-looking to OJ.

b) the time on Rescue 911 when the kid got his tongue stuck on the surface of the freezer and had to call 911 and struggle to describe his condition.

c) I think the phrase 'Drifter's Sympathy' came from a particular re-enactment I'd seen of a guy who'd lost direction in his life. It began with the camera panning down in an autumnal scene by the side of a highway somewhere in the Carolinas where this 'drifter' was throwing stones in a ditch and staring listlessly into the water. An old couple was driving by in a mini-van when he lobbed a rock at their windshield and cracked it. They pulled into the next gas station and called 911, which alerted a highway patrolman, who eventually found the guy walking further down the road. When the cop drew his gun and told him to stop where he was, the drifter slowly turned and started casually walking towards the cop with a little pocketknife in his hand. Consequently, the cop shot and killed him right there... the scene ended and then went directly to an innocuous commercial about a mattress warehouse or something like that. I've never been able to get that episode out of my head. As a little kid, for some reason it really disturbed me.

There's also a snippet of Alfred Hitchcock dialogue in a one of the tracks- how does film influence your music? And what sorts of films do you largely watch?

Film is definitely a pretty consistent obsession for me, I usually watch one a night before sleeping but I think I'm the kind of person that uses their obsessions to fuel creative endeavors or educate themselves instead of just hording statistics and alphabetizing a bunch of shit. When you're a kid and you hear something really kind of alien or sleazy sounding like Tangerine Dream's soundtracks to Risky Business or Sorcerer, those era-specific moments stay with you and often make a perverse return in your own art. I'm stuck in watching most any espionage films right now... I'm a sucker for stuff like Marathon Man, Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View.

The artwork on your albums (and website) seems heavily influenced by collage and juxtaposition- is this something you actively work towards?

I think we're collectively going through some sort of aesthetic crisis these days. When I look at the covers of the records assaulting the public daily there seems to be a type of general aesthetic confusion going on. I have a friend that's older and grew up just before punk really hit and he often laments how the punk phenomenon took away the ambition of bands to really learn how to play their instruments or make more 'developed-sounding' records. That's pretty analogous to how Photoshop has put the formerly-respected craft of visual art into the hands of the non-visually-inclined these days. I think record covers are basically like a song, essay or film in that they must have some sort of focal point or a central piece of meaning... if the image is going to have any power at all it can't just be a collection of peripheral elements. Virtually every record cover you see now has a fucking eagle on a pogo-stick or a pyramid balanced on a ice cream cone or some shit. We're kind of languishing in a post-modern graveyard y'know?

by Nathan Kamal

Imagine if the films that came out during the year of your birth actually had some bearing on your development. As if a film somehow can be inextricably linked to your own lifeline. It's a funny thing to imagine- a film sharing the same age as you. Of course, while our presence here is temporary, there is hope the film will live on forever. Our writers examine one film that shares their birthday, and in the process, expose not only their age, but why this special film still means so much to them today. - David Harris

1969 - The Wild Bunch (Dir: Sam Peckinpah) by Teri Carson

After seeing The Wild Bunch for the first time, my reaction was: "If this is a movie, then what have I been watching all my life?" I got depressed. Because there was no way I could even come close to such achievement, the film made me feel that I should quit making movies. I questioned my talent, my ability and above all, my courage. Six million dollars, 81 shooting days, 330,000 feet of film, 1288 camera set ups and 3,600 shot-to-shot edits later, Sam Peckinpah changed the face of cinema and my idea of what truly great filmmaking was about.

Peckinpah had been fired from his last film, and after three years of unemployment, The Wild Bunch was his opportunity to direct again. In its simplest terms, the story is about bad men in changing times, or as Peckinpah himself put it: "what happens when killers go to Mexico." It's an unrelenting, bleak tale about aging, scroungy outlaws bound by a private code of honor, camaraderie and friendship. The lone band of men ("the Bunch"), led by Pike Bishop (William Holden), have come to the end of the line and no longer are living under the same rules in the Old West. They are being stalked relentlessly by bounty hunters, one of whom is Pike's former friend Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who would side with the outlaws if it weren't for the threat of being sent back to Yuma Prison. In the bloody opening sequence, the Bunch ride into Starbuck, a dusty, small town. They hold up the bank and in the process annihilate the town. However, the job is a set-up: the loot they get away with is worthless steel washers. To escape the bounty hunters they cross the border into Mexico, where they agree to do a job for the dictatorial Mexican General, Mapache (Emilio Fernandez). It is to be their last job.

In the context of the times, the much-imitated and influential film was considered extremely violent. It's impossible to determine whether it's the most violent "ever made," or if it was the most violent of its time, and the question is probably irrelevant. What can be said is that with the newly gained freedom attained through the development of the Code and Rating Administration and in the midst of a volatile zeitgeist, Peckinpah, with the help of the brilliant editor Lou Lombardo and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, developed a stylistic approach that, through the use of slow-motion, multi-camera filming and montage editing, seemed to make the violence more intense and visceral. Peckinpah's intent was to "take the facade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved when they start to go into the typical Hollywood/television reaction syndrome and then twist it so it's not fun anymore--just a wave of sickness in the gut."

Who would rob, kill, steal guns, give the guns away to the peasants and go back to rescue a comrade and die for him? Every Western tried pull off that story but it never worked. It's pure romance. Peckinpah's objective from the onset was to make that story work. The budget escalated and the producer, Phil Feldman, complained to Warner Bros. exec Ken Hyman, who gave Peckinpah carte blanche after seeing the footage that was coming in. Hyman knew something extraordinary was taking place in that Mexican village. Peckinpah and his crew were creating a full landscape in the fullest artistic sense; sequence after sequence, a whole world of themes and emotions play out without dialogue. Peckinpah's genius for improvisation produced brilliant sequences that materialized out of thin air. The Bunch's march to their death was a scant three-line description in the screenplay. Nobody, including Peckinpah, knew what he was going to do because he never formulated a shooting plan before arriving on location. Once he was on set, before you knew it, Peckinpah built and built and built until it became that scene. The climax, The Battle of Bloody Porch, is one of the most extraordinary sequences on film. Again, Peckinpah did not have a clue as to how he was going to shoot it. He had four cameras rolling for 12 days and, legend has it, Cliff Coleman, the assistant director, was so good that the stuntmen, actors and even bullets never missed a mark, making the sequence relatively easy to edit.

As is the case with all great artists, Peckinpah had an extraordinary ability to take what people really couldn't see and turn it into something extraordinary. As the Bunch reaches the Mexican border to take refuge in a village, Angel (Jaime Sanchez), the only Mexican in the group, recognizes differences from Texas at the edge of the border river, but not the Gorch brothers (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson). Their conversation points out their cultural differences and varied perspectives:

Angel: Mexico Lindo.
Lyle: I don't see nothin' so 'lindo' about it.
Tector: Just looks like more Texas far as I'm concerned.
Angel: Aw, you don't have no eyes!

That's Peckinpah speaking to the rest of the world: "you are not seeing what I'm seeing." Peckinpah was a man who wasn't afraid to look at himself as honestly as he could and to strip away the artifice that makes mainstream audiences tick. He really believed in who he was and what he could do. In a scene around the outlaws' campfire, Pike dreams of one final, successful job before retiring:

Pike: This was gonna be my last. Ain't gettin' around any better. I'd like to make one good score and back off.
Dutch: Back off to what? (No answer) Have you got anything lined up?
Pike: Pershing's got troops, spread out all along the border. Every one of those garrisons are gonna be gettin' a payroll.
Dutch (sarcastically): That kind of information is kind of hard to come by.
Pike: No one said it was going to be easy but it can be done.
Dutch: They'll be waitin' for us.
Pike: I wouldn't have it any other way.

I didn't quit. In fact, I always look to this movie to set me straight when I start to lose my way. Like Pike, I want to be able to say "I wouldn't have it any other way" and really mean it. The Wild Bunch is an uncompromising ballet in which the action, the detail, and the lives of the characters are as Peckinpah imagined they would be. After the final sequence of principal photography was completed, Bud Hulburd, the special effects engineer, remarked: "I just had the opportunity to hang a Rembrandt. It will probably never happen again." He was so right.




1973- Serpico (Dir: Sidney Lumet) by Josh Vietti

Quality movie production comes in waves, continually improving or degrading, pending the movement of the wave itself. Sometimes the ebb and flow are personal to an actor, the production company or the director. The 70's provided many sparkling examples of some of each genre's best. Out of all of the classics, there was still one that, in my opinion, rose above to display not only one of the best in the genre, but showed what happens when good chemistry between the director, the actors and the studio all come together. The movie is Serpico.

Director Sidney Lumet is very good at putting you in the action very quickly. Few movies can draw you in within the opening minutes of a movie better than Serpico. It is about a good cop drowning in a sea of the corrupt. A man with a rigid morality, the kind that would tell you that you weren't allowed to smoke in a completely empty bar. Sure, no patrons to complain, but it is still against the law. His moral compass is true, which presents a problem in the dirty precinct he works for. He won't take the bribes, and hates looking the other way. And it starts to cost him as he begins to hate his job. Frank Serpico, played by Al Pacino, is thorough and correct to his training. Hours spent comparing fingerprint cards, just to make sure a suspect he's brought in doesn't have any priors. He is dedicated to being the best cop he can be.

Although this film is about dirty cops, it's also about the fragile state of the main character. After a transfer to a new precinct, Serpico realizes that his disdain for the police force remains unchanged, as it would seem everywhere he goes, cops are on the take. At parties, he would rather be known as just Frank, without anyone having knowledge of his profession. He is no longer proud to be a cop. It isn't long before Frank Serpico has reached his limit. After a payoff is delivered to him, he sees this as the final straw and approaches the reality that the time for action is now. Once he talks to a politician in the mayor's office and is advised that he should keep his mouth shut before he is killed, we begin to see the degrading of his fiber. He grows a beard, wears an earring and hippie inspired street clothes, and begins taping his phone conversations, even with the few allies he has left. His own friends are advising that he play ball, as he is appearing to no longer be trustworthy. All he wants is change. The very frustration of a man caught in an upside down world has now turned desperate, and he is starting to crack.

Pacino makes another benchmark performance here. Although The Godfather was so successful, it was not Pacino's film. It was Brando's film. Serpico was an opportunity for Pacino to make a statement. He spent weeks with the actual Frank Serpico before filming, getting to know him, learning his passion that he had and understanding the tribulations. Pacino applies his skills with ease, as the viewer has a good sense of what is going on inside this man's head and the turmoil and betrayal he is subjected to. Pacino received a Best Actor nod with a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.

I generally like my movies slick, fast-paced and visually large. This movie doesn't always capture my particular requirements when it comes to essence, but what it lacks in trickery it more than makes up for in solid drama. Never reaching a pulse pounding pace, this movie is more of a slow race, the winner not being decided on how quickly the finish comes, but rather how you arrive there. If you haven't seen it before, or if it's been many years since, give it another look and compare it to what is being produced today. With open eyes, you may see a different movie this time around.




1974- The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Dir: Werner Herzog) by Lukas Sherman

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is Werner Herzog's fourth feature film. Its German title is Jeder fur sich und Gott gegen alle, which translates to the much more evocative and pungent "Every man for himself and God against all." That could stand as an epigraph for many of Herzog's films (or Herzog himself), which often concentrate on a strong, sometimes mad, protagonist who takes on or is assaulted by the world, nature or others.

When I first saw this film in 2000, I wasn't very familiar with Herzog. I was coming off an unsuccessful year at grad school in Boston and something about the quiet intensity of the film and the poignant isolation and confusing death of the protagonist seemed to fit in with my rather deep pessimism at the time. At the same time, I was almost indignant (and still am) that Herzog wasn't better known and I wanted to become a film programmer just so that I could run a Herzog retrospective. I doubt he needs my help, but I'd still like to do it and Herzog remains one of the few filmmakers who has never disappointed, has an inspiring work ethic, and about whom I never tire of talking. He has vision, something that can be said of very few contemporary artists.

The film takes its plot from history. In 1828, a teenaged foundling wandered into Nuremberg. Nobody knew where he came from or who he was. He gave his name as Kaspar Hauser and claimed he had been raised in a dark cellar by a mysterious man who fed him bread and water. He became both a figure of fascination and speculation, including one theory that he was related to nobility. Then in 1833, he was stabbed under mysterious circumstances and died shortly afterward.

Herzog, concerned more with what he calls "ecstatic truth" then cold facts, takes this figure as his starting point and from there crafts a film that is one of his most beautifully shot, emotionally rich, and profound. Herzog's five films with actor/madman Klaus Kinski often overshadow the other films in his varied, formidable canon and even those collaborations are often better known for their difficult productions (jungles, dragging boats over mountains, titanic clashes between actor and star). Unfortunately, this means his persona sometimes comes at the expense of his films and though he's enjoying his greatest prominence in years (he was nominated for his first Oscar this year), he remains highly underrated and few of his films have received the serious attention they deserve.

The role of Kaspar is essential to the film and Herzog made the unorthodox decision to cast a non-actro that he'd seen in a film about Berlin street performers. Bruno S., with whom he also made Stroszek, was uniquely suited to play Kaspar, even if he was much older than the actual figure. The son of a prostitute, he was beaten as a child, institutionalized for many years, and referred to himself as "Der Bruno." Wide-eye and eccentric, Bruno is absolutely compelling and believable as Kaspar. So many films romanticize or sentimentalize the simple, natural soul (Sling Blade, Forrest Gump), but Bruno and Herzog make Kaspar a figure who is tragic, an innocent cast adrift in a world that seeks to understand him (the professors and clergymen), mock him, exploit him (he's presented as a circus attraction at one point), or make him like everyone else. There are many animals in the film and its clear that has more affinity with them than with his fellow humans. As Herzog says in Herzog on Herzog,"Kaspar's story is about what civilization does to us all, how it deforms us by bringing us into societal line."

This is a common, almost clichéd, theme, but Herzog makes it vital, provocative, and unsettling. Kaspar is the anti-Gump. Although he too is full of unconventional wisdom, society, rather than embracing him, sets out to destroy him, whether by treating him like a vagrant when he first appears or presenting him at a society party as a kind of pet (one woman calls him a "noble savage"). As Kaspar says, "The people are like wolves to me." Despite Herzog's dark vision, there's a great poignancy to Kaspar's isolation and this may his most nuanced and emotionally involving film. It's hard to identity with Kinski's spiraling insanity in films like Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Cobra Verde, but Bruno is intensely sympathetic and embodies some deep aspect of the human condition. Another one of his significant pronouncements is "Mother, I am so far away from everything." Fittingly, after his confusing death, the last word is had by a petty local official who is excited to write about a report about Kaspar. Herzog clearly identified strongly with both the character and actor and, although it may be unintentional, Kaspar's struggle can be seen as that of the artist in an uncaring world. One character tells Kaspar, "You used to think all your dreams were real." Herzog has famously (or infamously) gone to great lengths to make his dreams or visions real.

I don't think Herzog's ever made a bad film and while his Kinski films will probably remain his best know, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser may be his masterpiece: something powerful, beautiful, and strange.




1977 - Annie Hall (Dir: Woody Allen) by David Harris

I could have gone the easy way out and picked Star Wars. However, if I am going to pick a movie from the year of my birth that resonates most with my life, it will have to be Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Many of my boyhood fantasies involved living in a galaxy far, far away and adhering to a code not unlike that of the Jedi. But then I outgrew my toys and the Force slowly ebbed away; I was no longer a Jedi but a Jew.

"Am I Jewish?" Sure, my parents were born to Jewish parents from New York but we always celebrated Christmas as I grew up and I don't believe in God. Did that make me what Grammy Hall considers a real Jew? See, my family holidays always echoed the scene in Annie Hall where Allen's Alvy Singer visits Annie's (Diane Keaton) WASPish family upstate. While they converse about boat landings and drunken neighbors in mild-mannered gossip, the screen splits to reveal the family dinners past of Singer's childhood. Relatives talk over each other, discussing who has cancer, who has diabetes. Not one conversation goes by with my very Jewish grandmother today where I don't get the latest on who has passed away and who has prostate cancer. If there is truth in those 24 frames per second, Allen zeroed in on my reality.

Maybe neuroses and Judaism go hand in hand, but as I found myself fighting off hypochondria and adequacy issues in my adulthood, I am comforted by seeing another schmuck on the screen dealing with the same thing. Every moment in this film boils over with Singer's squirmy reactions and fear. Just look at the awkward courtship scene between Allen and Keaton as the subtitles give us the real story beneath the banal dialogue. And how glorious is it when Singer is stuck behind some blowhard in a movie line who thinks he has the corner on Marshall McLuhan and yet Singer produces the actual McLuhan to shut the prick up? We've all been in those situations with nary a McLuhan to reveal.

Allen takes aim at so much in Annie Hall it's impossible to believe he crammed it all into just 90 minutes. Relationships, religion, gurus, politics and sex are entangling in this brisk film. Though original edits of the film ran as long as 150 minutes, by zeroing in on Singer's love affair with Annie Hall, the film turned into Oscar gold for Allen.

So, even though Star Wars occupies a magical part of my boyhood, Woody Allen's little wand of truth is the red carpet to the pain of relationships and the evils, imaginary and real, which fill this adult world of ours. A few weeks ago at a party, one of my friends got drunk and kept calling me, "Jew." I heard him correctly. It wasn't, "Did JEW eat" or any slip like that. Something like that would have sent Singer running back to his analyst. I'm still not that sure if he was referring to me. And I never really had a Grammy Hall moment except when my wife's mother asked me if Jews can eat maple syrup.




1980 - Airplane! (Dir: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker) by Tara Pierson Hoey

There were some great movies that came out in 1980. I'd like to say that Raging Bull or Coal Miner's Daughter was the one that has resonated most with me over the years. But sadly, if not shamefully, it's the screwball comedy Airplane! that left the biggest impression on my twisted little mind.

First of all, it's quotable. I was able to charm my older brothers' friends at a very young age by saying things like, "Excuse me stewardess, I speak jive" and declaring that I had a drinking problem while lifting a full glass of water to my forehead and pouring it out, letting the contents spill down my face and party dress, just like Ted Striker (my mom was not fond of this one). These days, anyone can quote Old School or Anchorman, but when I hear someone order coffee and say, "I take it black, like my men," I know I have a future friend close-by.

Second, it was the first "forbidden" movie I can remember seeing. I don't think my parents fully remembered some of the explicit lines and scenes (a random set of boobs jiggling in front of the camera for a few seconds, a stewardess pleasuring an inflatable co-pilot, etc), and they let some of my friends and I watch it during a sleepover in second grade. While most of the dirty jokes went right over my seven-year-old head, I do remember asking my stricken mother what kind of magazine was Modern Sperm, which the Captain reads in one scene. My mom's mumbled, garbled reaction let me know I was in on something that I shouldn't be in on, bringing the movie a little closer to my heart.

Mainly, though, it's just funny. It's the kind of movie I can watch whenever it's on, still laughing out loud as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar tries to conceal his identity and squirming as the Captain asks little Joey if he likes movies about gladiators. It's a classic that spawned many more spoof films, serving as a template for things like Scary Movie and other satirical films. It also served as a career turning point of sorts for Leslie Nielsen, who played the role of the straight-laced, clueless doctor in the first major comedic role of a career that went on to include the Naked Gun franchise. It might not be important to cinema in the way that other movies released in the year of my birth are, but it will always be one of my favorites - the first movie I remember seeing where I laughed so hard, I cried. That's all I've got. Over, Roger.




1982 - Tron (Dir: Steven Lisberger) by Nathan Kamal

Say, what you want about the Disney Corporation, they've produced some fantastic things over the years. 1928- Steamboat Willie, soon to become the iconic anthropomorphic mouse we all know/love/loathe. 1940- Fantasia introduced topless female centaurs to a whole new generation. 1977- Peter's Dragon taught us all how to smile again. But in 1982, they produced one of the most awesome films of all time- Tron.

Bear with me- I said awesome, which is not the same as "breathtaking," "well-made" or even "good." Awesome is a quality that compels, not one that shatters standards of quality. And Tron is undeniably awesome. It's got everything a small child could want and that a mature adult sometimes craves- bright lights, gladiatorial battles and Jeff Bridges. The story is laughable and grows more so as time and technology far surpass the once-futuristic vision of programs with personality and warring corporations. But it's not about story- it's about the journey. It's about accounting programs forced to compete in death races. It's about chess programs growing so powerful that they can control every other computer in existence and probably beat them at chess. It's about Jeff Bridge's high pitched shriek. And it's about David Warner, the best bad guy ever.

As a child, I loved Tron. It was dated even back then- hell, the original Nintendo Entertainment System had better graphics than what passed for special effects. But it's the perfect story for a child- all the good guys are blue, the bad guys are red and a well placed discus can solve everything. It's perfect for a child, but it's awesome as an adult.




1982- Blade Runner (Dir: Ridley Scott) by Chris Middleman

Science fiction is a troublesome genre. It's all too easy for a narrative to be lost within $10,000,000 worth of CGI lasers and implausible technologies. Yet if we find it within ourselves to suspend our disbelief at the fantastic, sci-fi can allow us to take a keen look at our behavior as sentient humans in a sometimes crystal clear way; we could illuminate truths about ourselves that a narrative hampered by our own personal reactions to a contemporary-rooted story might not.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is one such science fiction examination of ourselves, taking elements of so many different facets of our culture and blending them into something that at once feels eerily familiar, completely possible, and above all, terribly disquieting. Whereas it's source material, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, dealt with not only a bumbling, insecure protagonist in Rick Deckard but also the pangs of class inferiority and the merging of religion and technology, Scott's Blade Runner instead focuses more on man's relationship to that which it creates; in this case, Doctor Frankenstein is always terrified by what he's done.

The Los Angeles 2019 of Blade Runner is a garish urban mass in which development has conquered any imaginable horizon and the corporations having spurred this have already moved onto colonizing space. One company, the Tyrell Corporation, has succeeded in creating lifelike androids to do the dirty work of building and securing these "off-world" facilities. At the point which these Replicants become truly sentient, they stage a failed revolt, causing terrestrial governments to criminalize the man-made life forms. Most are eliminated by bounty hunters, like Harrison Ford's Deckard, but four desperate Replicants make their way back to Earth to demand life from Tyrell, fearing the fail-safe of a very finite lifespan was creeping up on them.

Tyrell himself flippantly shrugs off his creation's pleas for life, before Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, crushes his skull. J.P. Sebastian, a biomechanic who'd worked on Replicant parts, is a fast-dying man in a dusty tenement creating bizarre Replicant playthings looking like the starts of the 1930s cult classic Freaks. They serve no purpose but to stoke his ego and are likely to die without his assistance. Sebastian does die, again at the hands of Batty, who was given a tortuous, brief life by the men he's killed. This flawed relationship between creator and creation crossed over into the the real world as well, as Dick held out for years on a favored screenplay and Scott was forced into releasing the film with numbskull narration which Ford was dragged, "kicking and screaming," as he says, into the studio to record.

Despite the utter coolness of hovering cars and the scintillating darkness and garish neon of the film's future L.A., this is the crux of what's always excited me about the film; speaking for myself as a writer, it's my pursuit to capture, explain and communicate whatever it is in my head that I feel needs sharing. This is especially difficult for me with poetry, which, boiled down, is the craft of attempting to define the undefinable. Most of my writing I consider a futile pursuit, as I'm no genius able to use my language like a science. I can hope to get it right enough to satisfy myself and I can hope to get it close enough so that the reader feels it or understands it too yet ultimately, the work, if read, will have a life of its own that may not fulfill the foreseen intent of its creator. All bets are off when an editor is involved. Dick understood this and was obviously hesitant about third parties; Scott dealt with it over and over again.

Scott has called Blade Runner his most "personal and complete" film and attempted to set the record straight with the wide release of its director-approved "Final Cut" in 2007. We should address also the creativity expressed by Ford; Scott wanted the movie to be ambiguous as to whether or not Deckard was himself a Replicant, a hired hand. This angered Ford, who played the role as though Deckard were human and himself questioning the nature of existence through his own love with Sean Young's Rachael, a Replicant. The ambiguity was never resolved- the key scenes being a Deckard's daydream of a unicorn and the origami unicorn Edward James Olmos' Gaf makes for him. "She won't live forever!" Gaf tells Deckard. He thinks of these, seizing the origami work and Rachael's arm with a resolve to enjoy the new relationship he's created for himself for what it is. Next to nothing is resolved in this neon-lit, rain-soaked, futuristic film noir- something that helps the film embody its own slogan of "more human than human."




1983- A Christmas Story (Dir: Bob Clark) by Lisa Bahr

As an atheist, I dread Christmas. The religious undertones that (in my opinion) ruin a perfectly good holiday for celebrating gluttony and consumerism are enough to make me ill. Luckily, I can take solace every Christmas by watching and rewatching that beloved holiday classic, A Christmas Story. Here is a movie that rejoices not in the splendor of some dead guy, but in the pure idea of desire. And although many people mistake it for nothing more than a funny holiday movie, it actually presents some pretty dark and sad themes.

If you haven't seen the movie, you were either raised by wolves or had parents who didn't love you. The film is about a boy named Ralphie (Peter Billingsly) who aches for a Red Ryder carbine action 200 shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time. He spends the entire year fantasizing about life with Ol' Blue and is so over-the-top about it that you kind of want to slap him, but feel bad for him at the same time. This kid goes through a lot and if you watch it enough times, you start to think that he is going to need a lot of therapy as an adult. He endures bullies, hallucinations, maniacal parents, an anorexic little brother, pink bunny suits and a neurosis that won't quit. By the time he finally gets the damn gun, you wonder what he's going to obsess over next year, assuming his father doesn't burn the house down in a fit of hysterical rage.

A Christmas Story has provided 26 years of entertaining one-liners and has surely carried its weight in the economy in the form of sexy leg lamps. It's the one part of the holidays that I can always count on being good, and has been a cornerstone of maintaining sanity in an increasingly cringe-inducing yuletide season.




1985 - Back to the Future (Dir: Robert Zemeckis) by Brady Baker

If I were to travel back in time and visit my seven-year-old self, I would fully expect me to reprimand me for blatantly disregarding the Doc's instructions and recklessly endangering the space-time continuum. This is the degree to which I was infatuated with Back to the Future as I grew up. Each and every detail of the Zemeckis-helmed, Spielberg-produced sci-fi adventure-comedy was etched so clearly into my memory that upon hearing Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" in adolescence, I supposed it must be a poor quality cover of the only song that Michael J. Fox ever recorded. To this day I prefer the Back to the Future soundtrack version over the '50s classic. Sacrilege, I know.

Assuming that the universe didn't collapse on itself upon our meeting, I would want to explain to my blissfully unaware self each and every pop culture reference lacing the Oscar-nominated screenplay; from Reagan and JFK to Jackie Gleason and Darth Vader. It's the same style of self-aware cultural reference that Zemeckis would exploit to incredible success in Forrest Gump nearly a decade later. But even with this knowledge, I doubt that my daily repeated viewings of the film could have been any more enjoyable. It's not simply the co-opting of pop culture that makes Back to the Future so timeless, but the careful attention to detail that it requires. Not a single line or plot point passes without eventually proving crucial to the relatively complex storyline.

In a breath, Back to the Future follows Michael J. Fox's Marty McFly, an '80s high-school kid who's unwittingly shuttled to 1955 in a DeLorean that's been flux capacitized into a time machine by the local eccentric scientist. As one might expect, Marty encounters some problems in this unique predicament. Passers-by cast puzzled looks on his unusual attire, the local pop shoppe doesn't seem to yet stock Pepsi Free, and his very existence is threatened when he inadvertently disrupts the sequence of events that were to culminate is his future conception and birth. In only a week's time, Marty is faced with the formidable two-fold challenge of setting his teenage parents up on a path to holy matrimony and finding a way back to his life in 1985.

As more than just a boon for Universal's bottom line, Back to the Future vaulted its boyish lead actor, Michael J. Fox, from sitcom kid to legitimate movie star overnight and solidified Zemeckis' status as a significant Hollywood director. Despite the relatively limited budget, he delivered a piece of top quality science fiction with just the right blend of humor, action and stunning special-effects. In the years that followed, countless science fiction films would hit screens with increasing budgets and increasingly elaborate special effects, but few would rival the depth of storytelling achieved in Back to the Future.




1985 - Lost in America (Dir: Albert Brooks) by Neal Fersko

People like to go on about how the generation that lived through the Depression and WWII carried a heroic stoicism and about the sacrifices they made for the sake of family and community. But truth is that their kids, the parents of my generation, often had to forsake the same dreams during years which people like to classify as more whiny than dire. The stakes may not have been the same, but the suburban finish line was undeniably similar. My folks always harbored a hope that they would find new peaks of creativity and feeling in their daily lives and chartered some really fascinating paths for themselves once school ended for them in the '70s. Often I find myself going through the old college books, art projects and postcards of my parents whenever I get the chance; wondering exactly what sort of life they forsook for the heartbreaks that came with a staid and nerve-wracking working class living. Albert Brooks' Lost in America has always provided a sort of window on the fantasy that they must have hung onto right up to the point where they decided to start raising kids. While Brooks' satire rebukes these daydreams pretty soundly, in effect siding with my parents, he also extends sympathy laced into his blatant chiding those who long to escape a more meticulous life.

The film opens with David (Brooks) and Linda Howard (Julie Hagerty) restless over a bright but emotionally stifling future which David will wipe out in short order following a heated white collar workplace breakdown and subsequent firing being after passed over for a promotion. The couple sees these turn of events as a blessing and witness their boomer guilt blossom into a full-fledged philosophy. They cash in all of their savings and pledge to travel from place to place in an immense motor home until they "find themselves" and achieve a vague and largely unspecified spiritual fulfillment. Both are fond of pointing to Easy Rider, minus the drugs and death of course, as a point of inspiration.

But if you know anything of Brooks' humor, you'll recognize his fondness of easing an audience into a long and protracted storyline before knee capping his own narrative just as things get started. Intoxicated with the freedom of their convictions, Linda blows almost all of the money at a roulette wheel in Vegas and the Howards are left with $800, a hysterically monstrous Winnebago and a slew of mid-thirties anxieties as they watch their prospects for the future dim very abruptly.

Brooks' longtime persona is an overly smooth but always irked west coast nebbish with a sharp sense of humor on closed door conversations. The funniest scenes of the film take place in business offices and over the phone in smart give and take dialogues where David tries to bring others around to his subdued but somewhat insane sense of entitlement. However, it's Hagerty who sheds her cartoonish Airplane! stigma to come off as the emotional heart of the movie. Kind but also confused, she brings a gentle bewilderment and a staid optimism to counteract Brooks' regimented moral clarity. Linda, not David is the first person in the marriage to feel the dread of the yuppie tomb they've designed for themselves but seems unsure that acting on what feels right is a viable path. Yet Howard is the one who assumes ownership of the endeavor and constantly complains when things steadily grow worse. Their insecurity not the time spent on the road (which is very brief) coins the title of the film in a welcome bit of irony.

Watching the Howards cope under the neurosis of six figured living and the desperation of minimum wage hell was probably the best way of showing me the innumerable bullets the kids of 1985 must have dodged had their parents read too seriously into Hollywood illusions and not enough into what they had actually learned in the '60s and '70s. Like Brooks, my parents believed that the lesson which their generation could take away from the idea of free spirited living was to internalize their desire for love and discovery by creating a more honest and jittery home and work life. While they would never become part of any bohemian elite or even Kerouac-lite yuppiedom, each would apply their long held philosophies to important, if unglamorous, jobs. Like David and Linda, they knew the only real way to stay lost was to buy into a fantasy long after its glitter had faded.




1985 - Better Off Dead (Dir: Savage Steve Holland) by Nick Brewer

Throughout my freshman and sophomore years of high school, it was a safe bet that you would find my ass parked on a couch next to my best friends Kim and Aurora. We were just young enough to have money and eat as much cookie dough as we wanted, but old enough to actually stay up all night watching movies and MTV. The more I got to know the girls, the more I realized they had a secret language of code phrases I just didn't understand. What does, "I want my two dollars" mean? The duo would crack up at the slightest instance of the phrase, "Sorry your mom blew up Ricky." Finally, after almost a year of inside jokes, I was finally allowed into the club, they sat me down and watched Better Off Dead for the first time. I was instantly hooked, and what was once a film I skimmed over at Blockbuster became a weekly obsession.

A 19-year-old John Cusack plays Lane Myer, a lovable looser who's life goes to crap when the "love of his life" Beth breaks up with him for the captain of the ski team, the aptly named Roy Stalin. Lane decides to kill himself, although unsuccessfully with hilarious results. During his attempt to hang himself in the garage, Lane realizes that he hasn't actually done anything in his life and abandons the idea, only to have his mother throw open a door, knocking Lane off the stoop as his cries for help are muffled by a vacuum cleaner.

At Lane's side is Charles De Mar played by Curtis Armstrong (Booger from Revenge of the Nerds). Armed with a large black overcoat and a top hat, Armstrong steals the show. While during a futile quest to get drugs in a small town, Charles both snorts Jello and when on a mountain, snorts snow and proclaims, "This is pure snow! Do you have any idea what the street value of this mountain is?" When not trying to kill himself, Lane decides he is going to get Beth back by skiing the K-12, a dangerous run as per the sign that says DANGER with an arrow pointed down. While on the quest for Beth, Lane strikes up a friendship with the French foreign exchange student Monique across the street. Monique is cuter than Beth and knows how to fix a Camaro while looking adorable, we all know where this is going.

Although Cusack and Armstrong are a great pair throughout the movie, I can't leave out the Myer family. His mother has the best of intentions, but is the worst housewife ever, boiling bacon and creating something that can only be described as a blob... with raisins. Lane's father is the hard-nosed dad who doesn't understand the youth culture and tries to put his son's life back on the straight and narrow, with little success. And the little brother Badger, is an evil genius in the making. The supporting cast does a great job of playing their roles very straight with absurd lines of dialogue.

While watching the film again for this review, I realized exactly how many of the lines I unintentionally have memorized. As Lane tries to avoid paying the paperboy, he rattles off, "My little brother got his arm stuck in the microwave. So my mom had to take him to the hospital. My grandma dropped acid this morning, and she freaked out. She hijacked a busload of penguins. So it's sort of a family crisis. Bye!" I recited most of this before realizing I wasn't talking to anyone in my living room.

Better Off Dead's story isn't the strongest, and it does follow the '80s formula for losing the girl to the jerk, sulking about it, trying to get her back, montage, defeating the jerk and realizing there is someone better and they didn't want the girl back to begin with, closing show with long drawn out kiss. What it lacks in story though it makes up for in slapstick comedy and hilarious dialogue, not to mention a dancing claymation hamburger singing the Van Halen song, "Everybody Wants Some."

I want to say the lasting effect that Better Off Dead has left on me is whenever I'm trying to cheer someone up, I usually lead with "buck up little camper." Kim and Aurora would be so proud of me right now.




1985 - Brazil (Dir: Terry Gilliam) by Danny Djeljosevic

"Whoever directed that is insane," said a trusted friend of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. He's not wrong -- Terry Gilliam is insane. No one makes movies like he does because no one dares to. Often considered Gilliam's best film, Brazil is also the source of one of the director's most troubled endeavors (in terms of movies he was able to complete), as he famously had to battle Universal Studios head Sid Sheinberg to get his 142-minute vision released in the United States.

Sheinberg, however, had other ideas. He developed a 94-minute cut with a more audience-friendly happy ending, infamously known as the "Love Conquers All" version. Terry Gilliam was furious, going as far as taking ads in Variety urging Sheinberg to release his cut. It was only when critics started raving about Gilliam's original that a slightly shorter version was released in America. Sheinberg's cut is available as part of the Criterion edition, a testament to how editing can completely alter a movie.

As a teenager I didn't know The Replacements, but I was adamant on seeing this weird movie by the guy who did Time Bandits and Jabberwocky. Seeing Brazil was as involved and quixotic as Gilliam's struggle to get it released. It required extensive research followed by a long drive to the only Blockbuster in South Florida that had a copy of Brazil on VHS. Pity my father, who had to drive me there and then remember to return it to the right store. When he popped it in the VCR to see what the big deal was, he was unimpressed; it reminded him of the socially conscious films from The Old Country.

Somehow, I've never seen Brazil with a fully alert mind. The first time, as a bored teenager, I needed two sittings. The second, as a college student with the Sundance Channel, I couldn't keep my attention focused. Most recently, as a grad wincing from every sip from that can of Steel Reserve, the film still threatened to put me to sleep. My heart wants to blame the beer while my mind says that Brazil is maybe a bit too thick in the middle. But I can't fault the film for a bit of excess that might just stem from my Sega-addled attention span. Brazil is a masterpiece of science fiction -- as strange and darkly hilarious as the great dystopic epics of literature. Except George Orwell and Aldous Huxley never thought to have their protagonists fight fire-breathing samurai in their dreams. Yep, Terry Gilliam is insane, and I love him for it.




1987 - Dirty Dancing (Dir: Emile Ardolino) by Michael Merline

While not a particularly memorable song due to its own inherent virtues, "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" likely sits in the subconscious of just about every child of the '80s, or even those born since. The charmingly memorable teen-anthem plays behind the final scene of 1987's Dirty Dancing and is only a small part of the film's highly contagious and utterly shameless dance-hit soundtrack. But between Patrick Swayze's entire performance, the radio hit he sang for the film ("She's Like the Wind"), the casting of decade-icon and relative disappearing-act Jennifer Grey, and all that grinding for the benefit of youngins' everywhere, pervasive shamelessness is what makes Dirty Dancing great.

I'm not about to indulge film critics with an in-depth analysis of this particular pop-culture icon's artistic merits, because depending on whom you ask there may not be any. It did win Golden Globes for parts of its popular soundtrack, but that doesn't make it an Oscar-winning masterpiece. Fortunately for director Emile Ardolino and every kid with access to cable television, critical respect really doesn't affect how easy it is to enjoy and appreciate Dirty Dancing. Hell, nobody puts Baby in a corner.

I know I once strictly avoided watching the movie. At first it was the probably the idea of youthful masculinity and playground self-defense that caused me to avoid a film with "dancing" in the title, though I certainly wasn't considering my motivations in such a analytic fashion. Later on it was just a pompous approach to film viewing; among my elitist friends the movie had a stigma, and I certainly wasn't about to question that. In fact, I managed to make it through high school without ever seeing the low-budget romp that made Swayze a star and Grey more than Ferris' sister.

But early on in my college days I ended up watching Dirty Dancing with a girl after trying vainly to find something more exciting to do. Maybe this says something about the more lackluster parts of my freshman year, but I loved the movie regardless.

Dirty Dancing takes the musical formula and cuts the song-and-dance numbers - leaving an expose of what real dancers can do (figuring out this is real entertaining long before Dancing With the Stars gave it a try). The love story, though predictable, is heartwarming and takes an effective stab at addressing issues of socioeconomic status, abortion, teen lifestyle and - of course - the rigors of courtship. The dialogue and interaction between the stereotypical characters is full of extremes; the good end up being almost angelic by the end of the film, the bad are downright despicable, and every event is the best of the best or the worst of the worst for the summer inhabitants of Kellerman's. This was certainly a product of the '80s.

But all of these traits combine sweetly, and make Dirty Dancing a nostalgic two hours, a danceable listen and perhaps the greatest date movie of all time. And this is represented by what I think of as the most memorable scene. No, it's not the finale, where Baby finally hits that impossible lift (you can thank the then-ripped Swayze for that). It's that first romantic interaction between Swayze and Grey when he gets his instructor-cum-heartthrob on and the two mouth the lyrics to "Lover Boy." Like I said before, shamelessness is the foundation of Dirty Dancing. And whether or not I'd be caught dead with the movie in my possession, I'm secretly thrilled and ready to shake my groove thing every time I see it.

Holy Sons

Label: Important Records






Drifter's Sympathy is a work of almost unnerving sonic dedication. Holy Sons' sixth proper album is a blend of atmospheric washes, buzzing guitars and fragments of noir, all finely geared to a sinister, oppressive sound. Recording over a period of two years, sole band member Emil Amos plays nearly every instrument (recruiting Kate O'Brien Clarke on violin) and has emerged with a breathtaking, intriguing album.

A mood is set from the very first track "Snowed In;" it's dark and disquieting, with a strange sense of motion. A slow, deep synthesizer works over a progression of notes while guitar distortion is somewhere far in the background, becoming dominant as the song progresses. It's like waking up before dawn, and seeing only night. The guitars eventually coalesce into a monotonous riff as drums move in and out of the mix. It's precisely evocative without needing a single lyric. The eponymous next track swiftly changes the formula without altering the mood; a bassline creeps up and down while Amos' haunting vocal keens, only to become a chant. He tinkers with his voice as much as any other instrument, but never without a deep and mysterious sense of loss: "Felt like I'd never been received/ And so I'd never be received/ Sometimes I feel like I wouldn't recognize love." As a sample of what sounds like a man preaching ends the song, you feel as much resentment for his platitudes as the monolithically gloomy narrator must.

The rest of the album does not disappoint. "Drifter's Dub" utilizes dialogue from Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 Shadow of a Doubt to frame a raucous clamor of vaguely Eastern guitars, while "Burrow Away" begins with a falsetto and an acoustic picked melody, only to climax in a fading violin. "Raised By Wolves" drones the title over hesitant drums, becoming almost a hypnotic drone in a too-brief five minutes. There's not a weak song on Drifter's Sympathy, but "Data Miner's Theme" comes close to qualifying. Spending nearly the first minute in fuzzy sound collages and ending with the sound of distorted rain, it's clearly designed to deepen the album's darkness, but it doesn't really need it. By the latter half of the album, the nearly cinematic morbidity is set and doesn't need to be reinforced by experimentation. "More Mind Briars" opens as nearly a lullaby, but then dives right back into the darkness: "I'm wasting my time/ That's very precious time" the narrator intones, sounding more resigned than frustrated. It's like watching a man wrestle with himself, and by the time he declares "There's a lot of briars in my mind," it's almost too painful to observe.

The last and longest track, "Immolation Thrills," is also perhaps the album's most intense song. Vague fuzz, almost like flames, and nearly inaudible vocals force the listener into a sense of distance, like watching something horrible happen from afar. By the time a deep and steady guitar keeps a repetitive riff over the droning voices, we are drifting along with it all and ready for the credits to roll.

Amos has described the album's aesthetic as emulating both German albums of the 1970s that broached both psychedelic experimentation and folk traditions, as well as the themes of film noir. He has succeeded admirably on both fronts: Drifter's Sympathy is a journey into something that can't be nailed down into words or stories, just like a drifter who can't keep to one place.

by Nathan Kamal

Nothing quite cuts through the sunny disposition of an eternal optimist like a depressing song. Forget all the joy, happiness, peace, harmony and the rest of that shit that music inspires in listeners; those emotions are easy. When a song can make listeners sob softly or catatonically stare at their shoes and ponder life's utter bleakness, that's when a song is truly special. Whether it's Richard Thompson telling a small child that there's nothing at the end of the rainbow or Tom Waits asking us to hang down our heads for sorrow, we all have songs that affect us in a certain way. So grab the tissues and open up those tear ducts as Spectrum Culture's staff presents their choices for most depressing song ever. - Eric Dennis

You only get to be disappointed in a handful of ways that really surprise you. It's likely that Mary Chapin Carpenter has written a song for each one. "Other Streets and Other Towns" is about the time when you attached all of your young dreams to the coolest and dreamiest person you ever knew, back when love could be wild and feel new at every turn. Non-coincidentally; this is the one person who could never love you forever.

The last line of the main chorus is when the full impact of her song sinks in and becomes our story too: "My dream are largely lost and found on other streets and other towns." Carpenter sings it in such a light and sweeping fashion that it takes a little bit of time for that to really sink in.

We still have hopes which are waiting by the porch light in an undefined and deeply nostalgic somewhere that's created just to agonize over on lonely nights. At the same time, it's true that most of us will grow up one day to be stronger and better at choosing who we let into our lives. "Other Streets and Other Towns" reminds us of a time when the stakes didn't seem quite so high and the line between wide-eyed longing and real devotion was nearly invisible. - Neal Fersko





Mark Kozelek- "Ruth Marie"
from Rock 'n' Roll Singer EP (2000)
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Pop music is so exceptionally good at describing the most minute iterations of adolescent romance that it's easy to forget how much of life there is left. It's hard to tell whether that's because the songs about married life, child-rearing and familial loss are not being written (this isn't the place, but at some point I'd like to write a piece about the band Truckstop Honeymoon's seemingly unique continuing exploration of those messy joys), or that the audience for songwriters in and past middle age is some combination of nonexistent, too distracted to listen or not profitable enough to notice.

And so one's first challenge when asked to consider "depressing" songs is to eliminate the small-t tragedies of romantic complication: any girl-group box set will reveal that a small army of anonymous professionals and hacks were mobilized in the early '60s, like military contingency planners, to address any possible narrative concerning romantic coupling between the ages of 14 and 25, plausibility be damned.

And you know what? Those kids got over it. The girls in a Shangri-Las or Jan & Dean song sobbing uncontrollably over a dead biker boyfriend grew up and married a dentist.

I say this with affection, because I do consider myself something of a connoisseur of sad songs, and I get a great deal of comfort from them. And it's no secret that Mark Kozelek, late of Red House Painters, sometime of Sun Kil Moon, is one of the great purveyors of congealed, lava-flow bummers - this is a guy who could, and literally has, record(ed) the national anthem as a dirge. "Have You Forgotten" was a staple of my college-age mixtapes, but further consideration reveals it to be basically a love song with an incongruous chorus, thus disqualifying to the task at hand.

Or - and this is where dumping Kozelek in the file labelled "Singer-Songwriter, Self-Pitying" gets complicated - you can read it as a love song to a troubled sister. Or even to the long-lost childhood friend of his earlier, charmingly homoerotic "Michael."

I guess what I'm getting at is that you can almost feel his songs expanding outward, from first-person singular ("I've not been so alone, I thought, since kicking in the womb") to first-person plural ("Letting someone into my misery") to second-person concern ("Have you forgotten how to love yourself?") - to the stop-dead third-person empathy of "Ruth Marie."

It's off the EP Rock 'n' Roll Singer, a funny throat-clearing after four years of silence and musico-legal issues; three AC/DC covers (prefacing a slightly underrated full-length of same), a John Denver song (post-facing a tribute album he'd organized of same), two pleasant originals and this: a song based (I've gathered, though I couldn't say from where) on a visit with a girlfriend to her grandmother in a Midwestern old-age home, in the voice of the grandmother, in all its incurably injured pride, clinging need, resignation, remembrance, fear and, finally, love.

I grew so old in that house I lived in
They brought me here 'cause I can't take care
I lost my worth and my purpose here
I feel you cry, but I can't speak my mind
Will you hold me and never let me go?
'Cause I hate it when you walk outside that door
'Cause I know I won't ever see your eyes
The eyes I gave you

It's a unique song for several reasons, not least as a hospital drama in song: the only other that comes to mind is "Girlfriend In A Coma;" but that is, finally, more absorbed with the narrator's reaction to the unnamed tragedy than it is with the subject, or even the doctor - or family? - to whom the tick-tock solipsism is addressed: "No, I don't want to see her/ Would you please let me see her?"

But it's also an entirely believable voice two degrees removed from the songwriter: a degree of age and a degree of gender. I'm in no position to judge its authenticity - I'm neither aged nor a woman myself - but it feels right, down to the petulance, despite themselves, of the elderly at the blithe departures of the children for whom they've worked and sacrificed. And for a songwriter firmly from the lineage of self-involved male depression, in which women appear in lyrics form pretty much as cause or cure, this is a explicitly and exclusively women's song - he's decisively irrelevant, if he's even in the room:

When my eyes shut, they'll take me to the land
For fifty years I lived there with my man
And on my own, I lived for forty more
I watched you grow up from babies on the floor
To the beautiful women that you are
And I hate it that you've gone away so far

It's a voice that rarely - unavoidably, and maybe by definition - speaks for itself in song. Aging and ordinary death are a natural concern of the novel (latter-day Roth, among many), film (On Golden Pond, obviously), even series-length television (Matt Saracen's alternately loving and selfish grandmother on Friday Night Lights): it's a long, deteriorating, universal and unavoidable story line, the tragedy of which is contained in its drawn-out inexorability and not easily expressed in a five-minute narrative. It's still small-t, unromantic tragedy, maybe, because it's so common, but I bet it feels just as raw, fresh, and helpless each time.

The evenings fall, they'll drag me out the hall
Up to my bunk and drug me 'til I'm numb
But past the haze, I see your pretty face
Remember me when I'm gone
And know I love you, though I can hardly say
And I hate it when you see me in this way
But in darkness, I'll always see those eyes
The eyes I gave you

- Franz Nicolay




David Sanborn- "For All We Know"
from Pearls (1995)

You know, the beauty of a depressing song is you never know the true meaning until you're faced with a situation that reveals it to you. In the fall of 2005, I found myself falling into a deep and unforgiving depression. My days were spent in my room or out in my grandmother's garden watching the world pass by. On the rare occasion, I would go out for a drive along the water on Highway 16, heading from Tacoma to Bremerton. For me, nothing beats a midnight drive. My life was beginning to manifest into an old blues song. The woman I loved and wanted to marry had left me. It was a time of vulnerability, a time of meditation and deep thought of what direction my life needed to go in.

I have always been a fan of David Sanborn's work. Most of his successful albums were pop influenced jazz and what I call "funky 80's jazz." Though I've always had a special place in my heart for his Pearls album. I've always loved the ballad, "For All We Know," though the meaning never appeared to me until that night. The song was written by J. Fred Coots and lyrics by Sam M. Lewis in 1934. Other famous version of the song have been done by Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, Nat King Cole, Rod Stewart and Roberta Flack.

The song opens with Sanborn playing a slow, powerful solo. Little Jimmy Scott begins to sing with his slow, sultry voice. His phrasing of the lyrics are perfect. His voice smooth, not overpowering the song in any fashion. "For all we know/ We may never meet again/ Before you go/Make this moment sweet again/ We won't say goodnight/Until the last minute/ I'll hold out my hand/And my heart will be in it."

The image that comes to mind when I hear the first couple of verses is the last night I spent with my girlfriend, Susan. Standing there on the porch in denial of what was to come. This was going to be the last time I saw her. I didn't know it then, but I definitely know now. We stood there lifeless, not wanting to say goodbye. Knowing the longer we waited, the harder it would be.

I was driving like a mad man. I wish I could tell you how fast I was driving, but all I can remember is being entranced by Little Jimmy Scott's voice. Johnny Mandel's orchestral work frames the piece nicely around the vocal arrangement, with Sanborn chiming in with small, passionate interludes. The song ends with Scott belting out, "This may only be a dream/ We come and we go/Like the ripples of a stream/ So love me, love me tonight/ Tomorrow was made for some/ Tomorrow may never come/ For all we know!" It was in this verse that I realized that one can never truly wish love could last forever. I realized then, that I needed to make a new start. That life does go on. And I was right, a year later I met my fiancee, Emily.

"For All We Know" is an enchanting piece from start to finish that will have you re-evaluating old love, past mistakes and have you appreciate all you've gone through and obtained. - Andrew Cray




Okkervil River- "Savannah Smiles"
from The Stage Names (2007)

"Savannah Smiles" takes as its subject Shannon Wilsey, a porno actress who traded under the stage name Savannah. By 1994, after appearing in hundreds of skin flicks, she was dead at the age of 23, shooting herself in the head hours after an automobile accident left her with a broken nose and facial lacerations. Wilsey's was a short and tragic life - her parents divorced when she was two years old, she had a miscarriage before turning 18, and large amounts of her porno dollars went to support her drug habit - and, all cynicism aside, consisted of the type of stuff ripe for lyrical interpretation.

In Okkervil River's The Stage Names, an album whose inherent despair and sadness are largely offset by up-tempo and precise instrumentation, "Savannah Smiles" is its bleakest and most heartbreaking track, sung from the point of view of Wilsey's father struggling to come to terms with the contrast of the daughter he thought he knew and the adult she's becoming. In an album where somehow even a song about the suicide of poet John Berryman carries a tone of liberation, maybe even optimism, there's none of that here. Singer Will Sheff assumes the father's persona and sings in a world-weary and utterly defeated voice as he tries to reconcile the "baby doll" he knew with her far-different adult version. The father accidentally discovers his daughter's diary - why he's rooting around in her room at midnight and how he "didn't know what it might be until it was open" are never explained - only to immediately regret his decision after reading only one page. We never find out what the father read, but it's clearly nothing good: "Talk about your big mistakes/ Hey Shan, nice going" is all he can muster as he's left staring at photos of his daughter when she was eight years old. There are, of course, "no tears in her eyes" in those pictures.

Sheff's vocal approach and lyrics are enough to turn anyone into a sobbing wreck; even the fall sky is gray and the song on the radio offers no comfort, for chrissakes. What's equally devastating is the song's arrangement. Occasional guitar strums, strings, xylophone and what sounds like a ticking clock are subtly blended together to haunting effect. Unlike many of Okkervil River's other songs, "Savannah Smiles" has no major musical highs or crushing lows; it just counts the days away slowly as the distance between the girl a father knew and the adult she is becomes greater and greater. Where portions of Black Sheep Boy could be faulted for being melodramatic, here the song's restraint actually heightens its impact.

Certainly Okkervil River has recorded its fair share of ultra-depressing songs; "A Stone" and "Song Of Our So-Called Friend" immediately come to mind. Hell, Black Sheep Boy should have been packaged with a case of tissues so listeners could dry their tears as they listened to it. Still, with its pitiable narrator, tired vocals and mournful arrangement, it's one of the darkest and most hopeless songs from this, or any, decade. - Eric Dennis




Henri Gorecki- Symphony No. 3, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
(1976)

The first time I heard Henri Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, I was driving from Washington, D.C. to my home in Annapolis, MD. It had been an extraordinarily long, difficult workday and I was tired of the hour-long trek between work and a real life. Hearing these Sorrowful Songs only exaggerated the how-sorry-I-feel-for-myself space I had been occupying. I almost pulled over to the side of Route 50 to blot my mascara-stained tears. This symphony was more powerful than any I had heard, but I attributed the depth of my feelings to, well, my feelings at the time.

The next day, I ordered the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs CD. I believe it was the Penguin Guide that advised that The London Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Zinman with Dawn Upshaw as the Soprano was the best at the time and I still believe it is. Just typing the title gives me chills and takes my breath away. By the time the CD arrived, I was not the maudlin person I had been on that tearful evening. With excitement, I cranked up the sound and sat in our living room to revisit an incredible memory of sound. Not two minutes into it, I was tearful again.

I marvel that any human can create such an incredible sound, this unearthly Symphony No. 3. A citizen of the Polish avant-garde during the 1950s and 1960s, Gorecki composed this masterpiece in three Lento movements toward the end of 1976 when he was in Katowice, Poland, and dedicated it to his wife. The four octaves and 27 minutes of the first movement highlights lyrics from a 19th century melody by Tatra Highlands folks musicians. In the middle, the soprano sings the Silesian folk song, "The Holy Cross Lament," about a mother searching for her son who was lost in the Silesian Uprising.

The nine minute, second movement was composed around the words scrawled on the wall of a prison cell in Zakopane by an 18-year old girl, Helena Wanda Błażusiakówna: "Mother, please do not cry. Queen of Heaven, Virgin most pure, protect me always." Gorecki noted that all the words etched into the prison wall were by prisoners who were justifiably angry and revengeful. Using the wall as an outlet for their frustration, they wrote words like "Murderers," "Executioners." Helena, on the other hand, was worried about her mother and longed to sooth her. Gorecki was fascinated by her selflessness and chose these words for this movement's text.

Dawn Upshaw's lament continues through the final 18-minute third movement depicting the voice of a mother crying for her dead son, the text of which may have dated from the First World War. The melody originated from Gorecki's native Opole. The strength of tone, the power of wailing grief, the austere timbre of a skilled Upshaw, and the faithfulness to the original inspirations make these songs mournfully sorrowful. But perhaps, like Peer Gynt's "The Death of Ase," the slow and steady ascension of the notes provide not only the depth of feeling that accompanies sorrow but also a glimmer of hope.

If you crave "whole" experiences, abandon the notion of diet drinks, abridged novels and don't listen to a truncated version of The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Schedule an uninterrupted 54 minutes that will transport you into another world where the separation of children from their mothers inspired music wrenched from the soul. - Jane Hruska




Björk- "The Anchor Song"
from Debut (1993)
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One of many songs Björk wrote on a bicycle tour of Iceland in 1990, "The Anchor Song" was first introduced on Debut. Björk rode around Iceland visiting homemade church after church, playing the harmoniums most farmers had in her quaint but sincere Björkish way. This song's eight lines make a concise statement: a description of someone diving into the ocean at night, "down to the bottom" and staying there as a "home." This simple image haunts almost as much as the beautiful but quietly desperate counterpoint of the harmonium (or saxophones, depending on the version).

It's certainly possible that the piece was meant as a simple personification of a literal anchor, dropping every night as a boat is buoyed until morning. But the lines "I dive into it... and drop my anchor" suggest a dropping of a dropping. I can't help but picture Björk plunging underneath the waves, touching the bottom and dropping her anchor, entering a submerged hibernation and recharging each night in the quiet of the deep. The spatial play between harmony and melody is different than most of Bjork's other rhythm driven work, and the result is a fragility that ironically weighs the song down, if you'll forgive the pun. - Benjamin Bernstein




Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds- "Sad Waters"
from Your Funeral...My Trial (1986)
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Apocryphal stories have Nick Cave, in 1986, riding the Berlin metro, writing lyrics in his own opiate-tainted blood, between nodding off. Be this fact or fiction, '86 was certainly a bummer year for the Australian songwriter; one that found him continuing to use heroin; one he must have spent somewhat alone, doing the solitary work of writing his first novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, as well as one that found him easy prey for the unforgiving UK music press. Cave must have been feeling despondent, alienated, and entrapped by his own life, as the double EP that he titled Your Funeral...My Trial was full of songs full of characters full of extreme emotions brought on by prisons they'd been thrown into, be they figurative or literal.

This record, released after the all-covers Kicking Against the Pricks, found Cave recording what sounded like actual songs, in comparison to the bizarre mythological blues rants of his first two records where, save for a few exceptions, the Bad Seeds provided a jarring atmosphere than any musical accompaniment. We hear Cave solemnly stifle just how angry he is, falling for crooked women over and over in the title track, society's misfits trample on through the mud, carrying the burdens of their status in "The Carny," and in "Jack's Shadow," Cave visits the damaging psychosis inflicted upon a man in solitary confinement. The violence reaches an arresting boiling point on "Hard On For Love," where Cave (like only he could) distorts Biblical symbols into double entendres, bound so tightly in chains of lust that any place other than inside a woman is the valley of the shadow of death.

The real magic comes after this disquieting half hour of music, after "Hard On for Love"'s frightening singularity of intent. On "Sad Waters," Cave seems to have a moment of clarity when he looks back wistfully at a past love. Singing "Down the road, I look/ And there runs Mary/ Hair of gold and lips like cherries," he references "The Green Green Grass of Home," covered by Cave hero Johnny Cash on his Live at Folsom Prison. Cave recalls a playful moment he and a love walked by a river, with the recording presenting a more sober-voiced Cave up front almost mournfully recounting the memory, whilst a second track of his voice sings more forcefully behind him as though it were the memories themselves, ebbing and flowing in the ether. From time to time, the two voices meet on the same word, as though some things are more vivid about this day than others.

While this tender moment is given splendorous treatment by Cave's organ and Blixa Bargeld's chiming guitar, Cave still makes mention of liberty deprived; even the root the lovers sit on is "bound" to the ground by ivy. Cave himself feels trapped by this memory of love likely lost, singing that he's "forever a hostage/ Of [Mary's] child's world" and that he runs his "tin cup heart/ The prison of her ribs." Mary, carefree and perhaps ignorant to the powerful attraction Cave feels, goes wading into the water, turning it "into wine" by her very presence. Cave assigns her a kind of messianic status; she is the Lamb of God compared to all of "whoredom" seen throughout the rest of the record. Such tenderness must have been wildly out of character for Cave at this time, some 10 years before The Boatman's Call. The song and therefore, the memory, begin to fade with Cave singing over aching organ chords: "Mary in the shallows laughing/ Over where the carp dart/ Spooked by the new shadows that she cast/ Across these sad waters/ And across my heart," he, knowing full well that the shadow cast by this idyllic love now lost will haunt him forever. - Chris Middleman




The Mountain Goats- "No Children"
from Tallahassee (2002)

In 2002, John Darnielle created a concept album that would be a final testament to his ongoing "Alpha" series. Since 1991 the "Alpha couple" had shown up in tracks like "Alpha Desperation March" and "Alpha Double Negative." But the entire Tallahassee album would be their final adventure together. In it, the couple moves into a house in Tallahassee, Florida and proceed to disintegrate and die in a fire.

But at what point is relationship is over? When the couple continues to exist out of habit? Where the line between love and hate is so blurred that they become one in the same? "No Children" could be the theme song. For one of the most depressing songs I know of, it is remarkably upbeat. With a spry piano part and walking bass line, although short, the pace is fairly quick. Darnielle's strength has always been his words. Explaining in few words very complex ideas without too much exposition.

The husband acts as the narrator throughout the song and is constantly proclaiming everything bad he wants to happen to not only his wife, but also their relationship in general. Ruining the friendships they may have made with people that care about them. And attempting to destroy any support structure that may prevent or hinder their own destruction.

I hope that our few remaining friends
Give up on trying to save us
I hope we come up with a failsafe plot
To piss off the dumb few that forgave us

What gets me the most about "No Children" is the fact that the husband is so overwhelmed with emotion, he is not only calling for an end to their relationship, but truly wanting both of their deaths.

I hope you die
I hope we both die

I once heard Darnielle say before performing the song, "Sing this like you mean it, you might not mean it tonight... there will come a day when you're gonna mean it." With that, the entire crowd cheered, and enthusiastically launched into the song.

I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand

Relationships are difficult. This isn't a remarkable revelation, but the relationship between these two characters was so intense that with its destruction, neither have anything to live for. And isn't that exactly what it feels like during a horrible breakup? - Nicholas Ryan




Damien Rice- 9 Crimes
from 9 (2006)

Damien Rice's song, "9 Crimes" features Lisa Hannigan, thrusting her voice through ribcage and tear ducts as piano keys travel alongside her moaning of hesitant longing toward a new lover. She burns through words such as, "It's the wrong time for somebody new/I t's a small crime and I got no excuse." As Damien Rice enters into the song, he breathes his deep sounds of denial regarding a situation of extreme lust and attraction between two people who feel the need to sing about what they shouldn't be engaging in.

"9 Crimes" can be found on Rice's second studio album, 9 and creates a haunting depiction of extreme attraction between two people who insist they are not the kind to cheat or stray.

Oddly, this song is featured in the computer-animated film, "Shrek the Third," which I have not seen, and feel grateful to not have my illustrative depictions for this song ruined by a possible montage featuring an ogre and unconventional princess frolicking together.

I play this song on repeat when I want to fill a room with my sadness through intense instrumentation and the beautiful vocalization of Hannigan and Rice. I play this song when my own tear ducts are constipated, therefore must be forced out. I play this song when I am longing or looking to hear the sounds of it. - Aimee Herman




Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Matthew Sweeney- "Blood Embrace"
from Superwolf (2005)
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First I ever heard Bonnie "Prince" Billy or any of his alternately melancholic or sinister songs about sex and obsession was in a parked car with the Oregon rain pouring down in an endless sheet across the windshield. The sky was completely ash gray. A friend and I were waiting for others to arrive, our plans completely ruined, and quietly he queued a song to play me as we sat in the confines of his old automobile. He told me he wanted me to hear something: "Blood Embrace" by Matt Sweeney and Bonnie "Prince" Billy's collaborative album Superwolf.

"Oh God, would I give her up to him/ If she told me he was better/ And that I didn't have the chance?" From the opening lines, so full of the worst kind of jealousy and confusion, to the bitter marital dialogue from the 1977 film Rolling Thunder, the song chilled me. It seemed awful, and yet too terrible true to deny; anyone who's ever suspected infidelity or felt the rage and pain of being second to some mysterious someone else could live by it. Since then, I've listened to Will Oldham range from the majestic to the quirky, but for me his dread has never reached the heights of "Blood Embrace." I return to its spiraling guitar, its quavering vocals, its sheer gloom in my worst moments. Our friends eventually arrived through the rain, but I never forget how I felt the first time I heard it- like I was just gonna sit there, and listen forever. - Nathan Kamal




Cat Stevens - "Father and Son"
from Tea For the Tillerman (1970)
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In nearly ever job I've ever worked, I worked with old men. Whether it was valet parking, janitorial duties, or hotel guests services, I've spent hundreds of hours hanging around small offices with guys in their sixties or older. Of course, there were guys my own age there too, but they were always the type who talked solely about relationship problems or party stories; neither of which I ever am a particularly good listener with and have little to contribute of my own. So I hung around the old guys. Jazz was my in. All these guys ever had to hear was I knew at least some music by Glenn Miller or Benny Goodman and they treated me like a boy genius. And in their defense, I look young. I fully expect to be carded in bars for the rest of my life. So for these guys to think I would only know Saturday morning cartoons really isn't all that unfair.

Over time they began to open up to me about their families. Some guys were obviously more guarded than others, but the ones who had sons always seemed to feel comfortable telling me about problems they used to have with their boys; about their fights over religion, school, the military, drugs, politics and simple inherent misunderstandings from one generation to the next. And these old guys hardly had a thing to say about their wives, and could sum up forty years of working in the same place with no sentimentality at all. But they remembered specific conversations from decades ago with their sons with incredible fluidity.

Not surprisingly, it was my own dad who introduced me to Cat Stevens and specifically to the song "Father and Son." I liked it when I first heard it, but it didn't mean much to me. My dad and I have always gotten along. We go see shows, we go out to dinner, we try to take a trip together every summer; and so Cat Stevens' lyrics about a strained paternal relationship didn't hit home until I worked with the old guys. Stevens' voice shifts between the characters much like the old guys told their stories. The father and the son became people I knew; I could give them faces; they had voices separate from Stevens'. Never had a song come alive for me like that. And I guess that's why I think it is so depressing. Love songs are one thing, and they are great for pity parties. But those feelings can pass and people recover. With families, that's the foundation of who you are. And at any given time there's some kid who feels like he's alone in knowing best, and there's his father who can only look on while the kid falls with hostility into an avoidable mistake. Goddamn I think that's sad. - Brian Loeper




John Prine- "Hello in There"
from John Prine (1971)

You don't hear many songs about the elderly. You hear even less about the loneliness experienced in someone's twilight years; in fact, taking a look over the pop music canon, you could be forgiven for thinking loneliness is something experienced solely by the young and misunderstood. But like Tom Waits, John Prine wrote and sounded like an old man even when he was young. It makes sense, then, that one of Prine's greatest songs focuses on an old couple who have been left all alone; in some sense, it's just Prine looking after his own.
Taken from Prine's masterful self-titled debut, "Hello in There" is the songwriter at his best. Little more than gently plucked guitar and a metronomic muffled beat, with a Rhodes offering counter-melodies here and there, "Hello in There" is simplicity incarnate, its real powers stemming from Prine's lyrics. Prine as a lyricist has always excelled at wonderful character studies, providing details piece by piece and trusting the listener enough to not completely spell anything out. Despite the Dylan comparisons Prine received at the beginning of his career, the two couldn't be further apart; where Dylan trades in surrealist myth-building, Prine is a man of the people, offering messages that can be savagely witty or downright depressing, often both within the same song.

But "Hello in There" is almost exclusively the latter, the intent spelled out from the beginning by Prine's narrator who states, "it'd been years since the kids had grown/ A life of their own/ Left us alone" before listing his children's destinations, seemingly more out of an attempt to bring the memories of those children out from the dust-covered boxes they'd been left in than an explanation. Despite the fact that "old trees grow stronger/ And rivers grow wilder every day," the narrator can't help but notice that "old people just grow lonesome/ Waiting for someone to say/ Hello in there/ Hello."

It's a tragic truth, spurred by everyone's fear of becoming old themselves and thus closer to death and on its own it would be hard but tolerable to bear. But the type of pain Prine writes about is never so obvious and what makes "Hello in There" quite possibly the saddest song of all time is what follows. While it'd be hard enough to endure the loneliness of old age with your better half, our narrator confesses that he "and Loretta don't talk much more/ She sits and stares through the backdoor screen," indicating that Loretta has felt the impact of age more than he. The narrator thinks about calling up an old friend, but decides they wouldn't have anything to talk about, since now life "just repeats itself/ Like some forgotten dream/ That we've both seen."

And therein lies the message, the fact that we're all repeating the same things and by the time we realize it, it's too late. We all wind up alone and dying, but how many of us do anything to comfort those who already are? The tragedy of "Hello in There" is that its characters have seemingly been quarantined as a result of their age, their family and friends having basically abandoned them. And if the fact that old people are just waiting for you to drop by and say hello in there isn't the saddest thing you've ever heard, I'm not sure I want to know what is. - Morgan Davis




Dar Williams- "When I Was a Boy"
from The Honesty Room (1993)
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I'm no sap, but every time I hear the opening notes of Dar Williams' "When I Was Boy," a lump forms in my throat and by the last verse at least one tear is threatening to fall. On the surface, the song, is devoted to the weighty topic of gender roles as Williams reminisces about her tomboy youth and laments the current societal pressures of womanhood (like attracting and keeping a big, strong man). But at its core, the song is about childhood and the completely uninhibited and genderless way we lived as kids, something we sadly lose as we grow up, conform and abandon the freedom we enjoyed when we were girls and boys.

It hit home for me as the ultimate big-girl event - my wedding - approached. Staring at my white-gowned image in the mirror, a line from the song played on repeat in my head: "See that picture? That was me/ Grass-stained shirt and dusty knees/ And I know things have gotta change/...But I am not forgetting/ That I was a boy too."The realization that I was actually a grown woman, when I still thought of myself as "a kid that you would like/ Just a small boy on her bike" was extremely tough to swallow. It reminds me that not too long ago, I didn't care about what I wore or how I looked or really, what the future held. All I cared about was what could, as Williams sings, "help me climb a tree in ten seconds flat."

It's not limited to tomboys-turned-brides. Williams gets into the head of a guy as the song closes, and he confesses that when he was younger, "My mom and I, we always talked/...And I could always cry, now even when I'm alone I seldom do." As I'm expected to doll myself up and "find a nice man to walk me home," guys are expected to be manly men, not letting their guards down.

The song makes me remember that I'm a grown-up. When we were kids, we were all alike. We were all driven by our desires and our imaginations, not worrying about what people thought or where our lives were supposed to go. We did what brought us joy. Today, as bills pile up, deadlines loom and I'm bombarded by ads for pills and creams that will improve my appearance, this song is a sad reminder of the days when we were all on equal footing and all that mattered was that we were doing what made us happy. I was a boy. I was a girl. It didn't matter back then. - Tara Pierson Hoey




The Velvet Underground - "Sunday Morning" and "Heroin"
from The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
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"Sunday Morning," the first song on the Velvet Underground's1967 debut is deceptively simple and pretty. Like many great depressing songs, it disguises its dark, haunting lyrics with a hummable melody. It's the rare opening song that feels like a closing song, chronicling the narrator's slightly dazed walk home after a night of who knows what kind of debauchery. The chiming celesta and gentle bass line give the song an almost lullaby quality and Lou Reed sings in a slightly higher, ghostly voice: "Sunday morning/ Brings the dawn in." Later he whispers in a slightly creepy/creeped out voice "Watch out/ The world's behind you." It's a deeply paranoid song, one in which the narrator, on the stereotypically holiest and most relaxed of days, is in danger of completely losing himself and being crushed by the weight of the world, the wasted years, and his own inner turmoil. When Reed revisits the title, it's "Sunday morning/ And I'm falling," it's the kind of song you listen to curled up in a ball on the floor. The band wouldn't really explore their more vulnerable side again until their self-titled 1969 album.

"Heroin" opens the second side (on the record) and is brutal and explosive where "Sunday Morning" was intimate and composed. On the surface, it feels haphazardly assembled: drums that sound like overturned cardboard boxes, a few rudimentary chords, a seesawing viola (and no bass). Most listeners don't have firsthand experience with the drug, but they don't have to; heroin is used as what the late J.G. Ballard called an "extreme metaphor." It's a metaphor for utter desolation and psychological devastation, summed up in the first line, in which Reed, only 24 at the time, sounds unbelievably weary, dragging out the words: "I don't know/ Just where I'm going."

Yet there's a yearning and desire for escape that gives it more depth than the average drug song (and this is the drug song to end all drug songs), as Reed feels like Jesus' son and wishes he were a sailor 1,000 years ago: "Away from the big city/ Where a man cannot be free/ Of all the evils of this town/ And of himself and those around." But he is constantly dragged back to the intense, somewhat surreal, Burroughs-esque world that he's trying to shake-one of gabby politicians, mean people, mounds of dead bodies, and, of course, heavy drugs. As Reed starts to unravel, so the song speeds up and descends into a rather terrifying cacophony, as if it were trying to tear itself apart. That this came out during the height of hippie-dom makes it all the more striking.

Over 40 years later, little has matched the intensity of "Heroin," even though Reed, who can have a sadistic relationship with his audience, continued into the heart of darkness, both lyrically Berlin and sonically Metal Machine Music. "Heroin" is an unrelenting epic of disgust with the world and psychic disintegration that leaves nothing standing-especially the narrator-when it's over. And all Reed can conclude from this harrowing drug trip is "And I guess I just don't know." - Lukas Sherman




Leonard Cohen - "Famous Blue Raincoat"
from Songs of Love and Hate (1971)
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In my experience, great things don't happen at 4 am in the deathly cold of December. Judging by "Famous Blue Raincoat", it appears Leonard Cohen agrees.

The elegant, spare production Bob Johnston uses to surround Cohen is pristine - desolate and cold, like the snow of the winter the writer has surrounded himself in. It leaves Cohen's voice (drenched in reverb) and guitar to tell the tale of his doomed love triangle. As the singer writes a letter to an old friend, he reflects what that man's affair has cost them all - Jane is "no longer anyone's wife," and the other man is "living for nothing now."

Despondency lies in the helplessness and self-reflection the letter brings its writer - he can't help but see the other man as both "my brother, my killer," unable to forget the images of the evidence of his affair. He sees plainly that Jane is more at ease, if not better off - the pained look in her eyes is gone, the very pain the author had given up on relieving long ago. He's haunted that it only took "a flake" of the other man's life to do what he couldn't, and considers it a personal failure.

Cohen's delivery is frankly stunning, both naked and nuanced in all the right ways. He embodies the conflicted feelings he expresses verbally (to no surprise, since it's an autobiographical song). He oozes venom when taking shots at the past, but seems sincere when he thanks his unnamed rival for standing in his way. Above all else, he's exhausted.

Cohen has voiced some frustration with the song, claiming it was unfinished lyrically - too open-ended, and too abstract. It's precisely this quality that makes it so affecting. The pains of love and trust are rarely one-sided, and never fully understood - they swirl inside your head, occasionally spilling out in the form of ink on paper. Or, in the hands of Cohen, a perfectly sad song. - Jason Stoff




Kenny Rogers and the First Edition- "Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town"
from Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town (1969)
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Over a dozen artists have covered this Mel Tillis-penned song, including Leonard Nimoy and Right Said Fred, but it was Kenny Rogers and the First Edition who put "Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town" on the map in 1969, bringing to it the despondency of his vocal rendering and the band's tender country angle. The lyrics of "Ruby" tell the true tale of a war vet with no choice but to sit back and watch his wife preparing herself for dalliances with other, more able-bodied men. He watches her gussy herself up for an outing as the evening sets in, and implores her to stay. That "crazy Asian war" (in Korea) has robbed him of the abilities necessary to met her earthly needs, but "it won't be long," he's heard them say, "til he won't be around" anymore. "If I could move, I'd get a gun and put her in the ground," muses the coalescent, which makes for an extremely creepy, besides heart-rendin ditty. Not because we haven't all fantasied about unfaithful lovers getting dead, but because Tillis wrote this song about a murder-suicide case in which a WWII survivor's nurse-turned wife tested his mettle one too many times with other fellas.

The imagery of her painted lips, curled tinted hair and the dismissal with which the anguishing narrator is treated, along with its soft, instrumental cadence are what give this masterpiece its poignancy. "I still need some company," he pleads, acknowledging that with his 'bent and crippled legs,' he can't be of much use to her. But selfishness, that common symptom of those young and blessed with beauty, has her gallivanting off to town and leaving her infirm husband in the lurch of solitude. Between Rogers' convincingly defeated voice and the collective awareness of being deserted, this tear-jerker is engineered like some old photograph of a well-loved traitor. Maybe you should retire it to the sob-stained annals of a past life... but once it does its circulatory rounds, and disperses all that hope and hurt and you're back to wallowing in just how good bad can feel. - Joan Wolkoff




Pink Floyd- "Vera"
from The Wall (1979)

Though it may seem passé now, one of the most devastating listens is the first four songs of the third side (or second CD) of Pink Floyd's The Wall. True, the rest of The Wall is an album about passive child abuse, the loss of a parent, emotional disconnection from the rest of the world, walled off dreams and the implosion of the ego by the dynamite of self-loathing, the run of songs kicked off by "Hey You," mark not only the emotional epicenter of the double album, but the scared child lurking behind the terror of the wall.

Roger Waters created a story about a rock star who is utterly crippled by his neuroses; yes, "Pink" spends most of the album blaming women, his mother and past lovers, for his problems, but as the "wall" crumbles down at the end, Pink's world is filled with sounds of his childhood and he spends his insulated days couched in the inculcation of television and other tools of flaccid self-destruction. It is obvious that this Pink, and possibly Waters by extension, feels unlovable and rather than let this supposed cold world destroy him, he freezes it out first with epic fits and then by lashing out at those who love him. "Can you feel me?" and "Would you touch me?" he flails out during "Hey You." But it's too late by this point since the wall is too high and there is respite for the emotionally weary.

Though "Is There Anybody Out There?" with its intense arpeggiated strings and the litany of self-hatred "Nobody Home" follow "Hey You", it's the emotional wallop of "Vera" that clinches this depressing run for me. On a topical level, the song is about British singer Vera Lynn, who hosted a program on the BBC named Emotionally Yours during World War II. Since the death of Waters' father during the war is also a major theme of the album, it seems appropriate that he brings up icons from that era.

Once again, the sounds of television and an explosion begins "Vera." "Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?"asks Waters in a plaintive quaver. Sympathetic violins follow as he continues, "Remember how she said that we would meet again some sunny day?" The film version of The Wall begins with Lynn singing "The Little Boy That Santa Forgot," which includes the lyric, "We'll meet again, Don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day." At the heart of this song is a scared little boy, waiting for that sunny day when his daddy comes home.

But the second half of the song, after the gentle musical break is when the really sad part comes in. Waters delivers, "Vera/ Vera/ What has become of you? Does anybody else in here/ Feel the way I do?" in such a heartbreaking warble, voice curling the "As" in Vera's name, as the syrupy strings drive the point home. He is unable to recognize that he is not alone in his pain, that he is not completely untouchable. That self generated isolation is the biggest tragedy of all.

Sure, "Vera" is a song about a father who does not return from war, but it could also stand as a paean to unrequited love. There are certain connotations, certain connections we all make that allows a song to penetrate our psyche. For me, this song is the soundtrack to a broken-hearted young man on a July day, crying on a train in rural Spain. The air-conditioning is not working and his car is rippling with heat waves. Does anybody but him remember his tears on that sunny day? Probably not. - David Harris