Dylan is the latest reader to add to our placed-based series:
My closely guarded secret is that I grew up in West Virginia not really liking John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” This is sacrilege. The song is deified in the Mountain State. It’s the official state anthem. (This is odd because the lyrics actually invoke geography—Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River—that actually describes the Commonwealth of Virginia, not West Virginia.)
Nevertheless, for the past 29 years, “Country Roads” has permeated my life. My first grade class performed it in the lunchroom, even accompanying it with sign language. During our high school trip to New York City, Jamaican steel drum players heard where we were from and ecstatically chimed out the tune unprompted. After moving out of state, it has become a common reference point when I was asked where I’m from. And every West Virginia wedding I go back for ends in everyone forming circle on the dance-floor, arms intertwined and singing, “Take me home, to the place, I belongggggggggg.”
But the song eventually caught up to me. Maybe it’s the charm of a gorgeous melody sung with quavering loneliness. Maybe it’s the lyric “almost heaven,” which recognizes the feeling of living somewhere that is simultaneously beautiful and undeniably impoverished. Maybe it’s the magic of a song that ushered me into adulthood, whether I liked it or not. Whatever it is, it worked.
For a few fantastic covers of that country song, check out our note featuring a reggae version from Toots and the Maytals and a German-language version by Dieter Dornig. Bring mich nach Hause!
Update from reader Jeremy, who can relate to hearing the German rendition up close:
Wow, thanks for a great Track of the Day. I've always like the song and it’s remarkable how universal it is. It’s remarkable how many times and in how many diverse places I’ve heard it. I grew up in Virginia and have always sort of identified with Denver’s description of the Blue Ridges and the Shenandoah, yet the times that the song most sticks in my mind have been in in totally different contexts.
The first time I went to Munich for Oktoberfest I was treated to the song being covered by a traditional German brass band as we walked into a beer hall tent. The entire tent was singing along at nearly full volume and the entire scene just emphasized the universal camaraderie that the best international gatherings can bring out in people. We ended up having a wonderful afternoon with everyone around us, including a group of Russians seated next to us with whom we could only communicate by drawing images on a sheet of paper.
The other instance that stands out in my mind was roughly five years ago while I was traveling alone in Vancouver and feeling lonely and homesick. Seeking comfort food I ended up in a ramen restaurant and was treated to a K-Pop cover of country roads that translated everything but the “West Virginia” line into Korean. Somehow the song brought me back to Virginia and Munich at the same time and put a smile on my face.
Another reader, Garrison, highlights a Japanese version:
I was struck by your discussion of international renditions of “Country Roads,” so I thought I’d add another take to the pile. I’ve always enjoyed the song, but the first time the song ever really jumped out at me was when I heard it in a Japanese animated film. The protagonist of Studio Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart, an aspiring writer, struggles over the course of the movie to rewrite the song in Japanese. The final product serves as the song for film’s ending credits (a translation—which I cannot vouch for the accuracy—is available here):
It’s interesting how a song with such a specific geographic focus has such an international presence, but I think the nostalgia it evokes for a
“home” is something that anyone can relate to. Everyone has their own West Virginia.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
All you Chicagoans out there can probably relate to reader Max:
So, I’m a transplant to Chicago, and am sure that you will be inundated by songs about New York (my real hometown) and Los Angeles (where I spent my late 20s). While I don’t think any song can accurately capture a city in its totality, I think Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah’s “Lake Shore Drive” captures the feeling of driving on the iconic roadway in Chicago, at a particular time in the past. The blue lights and the concrete mountains all speak to the place as it was in the ’60s and ’70s. The blue lights are gone, replaced with bright yellow lights that produce the worst light pollution in the world (We’re #1, We’re #1). The area they were driving to is the Gold Coast, now called the Viagra Triangle … someone should put that in a song.
Snowbound on Lake Shore Drive,
getting out of town.
Won't get my car back,
'til springtime comes around.
Thought that I would make it,
but oh boy was I wrong.
I'm sitting here on Lake Shore Drive,
singing this sad song.
I'm stuck in Lake Shore Drive,
'til a snowplow comes along.
There ain't no road just like it,
anywhere to me.
When I took Lake Shore Drive,
should have brought my skies.
I'm stuck here on Lake Shore Drive,
trying not to freeze.
It starts up north on Hollywood,
no one's gettin through.
Got snowed in half way home,
nothing I could do.
I hope they come and get me,
the snowplows make it through.
I didn't fill the tank before I left,
I would have if I knew.
I should have filled the tank before I left,
I would have if I knew.
There ain't no road just like it,
anywhere to me.
When I took Lake Shore Drive,
should have brought my skies.
I'm stuck on Lake Shore Drive,
trying not to freeze.
Someone help me please.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
I’d love to nominate “Angel From Montgomery”—written by John Prine and best performed (in my opinion) by Prine and Bonnie Raitt as a duet [here—and a solo version with Raitt is above]. The lyrics are beautiful in their simplicity. It’s a song about what could have been, about opportunities missed and dreams long lost. But for me (a young woman and Australian, living as far away from Montgomery as I could possibly be) the lyrics never fail to inspire, to make me consider my own dreams and think about what my life might look like when I’m as old as the “old woman” Raitt and Prine sing about. The tone and cracks in the voices of both also make for spine-tingling listening.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
How should one aurally mark the occasion of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature? One could, if one was foolish, ask a Dylanologist to name his or her favorite Dylan tune; to do so is to open a Pandora’s box full of hot air. Still, a few nominations would float to the top of the list: the sublime “I’m Not There,” a semi-lost track from The Basement Tapes; a mid-career masterpiece like “Blind Willie McTell”; one of the early landmarks, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
I’m not sure what my favorite Dylan tune is, but my pick for the best would probably be the most conventional one: “Tangled Up in Blue.” (Fittingly for Dylan, an artist inseparable from the great American folk tradition, it’s an opinion I inherited from my parents.) It might, in fact, be the greatest song in popular music.
In his excellent piece on the award this morning, my colleague Spencer grapples with the deathless fight over Dylan’s literary-ness. Like Michiko Kakutani, I am loath to separate Dylan’s lyrics from his music, but I am hard-pressed to see how he doesn’t qualify as literature. Many of Dylan’s best songs are short stories, with complete universes and plots, whether the crisply formed tales like “Black Diamond Bay” or the woozy, dissolving late talking blues “Highlands.”
“Tangled Up in Blue” fits somewhere in the middle. There’s a full cast of characters, a set of indelible images, a variety of settings. But the song also features an unreliable narrator; it’s not clear how the episodes described fit together, where and when they all occur, or who precisely the characters are. Is the “she” mentioned in the song constant throughout, or is there more than one woman? (Adding to the confusion, Dylan sometimes performs the song, written in the first person, in the third person.)
Perhaps the bard was even asserting his own place in the literary tradition with the song. At one point in the narrative, Dylan picks up a woman who’s working in a topless bar.
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
Who is he referring to? One common guess is Dante. Dylan himself has said Plutarch, though he likely meant Petrarch. During his Christian phase, Dylan often rewrote the lyrics to refer to various verses of the book of Jeremiah. Sometimes he omits it altogether. The narrator goes on:
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue
Dylan is divisive, and proselytizing for him tends to be painful for both the Bob obsessive and the Bob skeptic, but for millions of listeners (and the Nobel Committee), this description of the enigmatic 13th-century poet could just as easily describe the effect of Dylan’s own work.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
As someone who’s lived in four Brooklyn neighborhoods, I’m getting a bit maudlin over this first pick from reader Doug:
“Tourniquet” by Hem and “I and Love and You” by The Avett Brothers evoke a very specific time and place for me during the six months I spent living in Brooklyn interning in the winter and spring of 2013. Both of these songs were released around then, and they served different purposes for me: “Tourniquet” was a song that put names to all of the neighborhoods surrounding me that I was coming to know. “I and Love and You” felt dead on to me, because that was very much what I was looking for at the time: a city to take me in.
If you have any nostalgia bound up in a song based on a specific place, please drop us a note and we’ll post.
(Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
I’m the type of music fan that likes to immerse myself in an artist or an album, listening over and over again. But seldom do I find myself listening to the same song over and over, back to back. That’s how I’ve been consuming “Heart Like a Levee,” the title track from Hiss Golden Messenger’s new album, which comes out today:
I’ve been trying to figure out why I keep listening to it. One reason is that enigmatic title: What does it mean to have a heart like a levee? Another is the tension between the gently rolling music and its bittersweet lyrics. Hiss Golden Messenger’s M.C. Taylor has always been a highly personal songwriter, but the latest album grew out of a commission by Duke Performances, which paired Taylor up with the late photographer William Gedney, some of whose photographs reside in the university’s archives. In contrast to Taylor’s confessional style, Gedney was a private, nearly reclusive figure, barely known when he died of AIDS in 1989.
Taylor worked with a series of photos that Gedney took in Kentucky in the 1970s; one adorns the cover of Heart Like a Levee, and it’s on the video above. Trying at first to write songs about the photos, he eventually gave up and switched tacks, writing songs about his own life but inspired by the images. One striking line here: “Do you hate me, honey, as much as I hate myself?” Taylor sings the song over a hypnotic, circular chord pattern, with a catchy, chiming guitar riff.
This is folk-inflected music, but it’s not rudimentary or primitive. Hiss Golden Messenger has traded some of the thump of previous albums for a sound that’s almost proggy at times. (The album’s co-producer, Bradley Cook, was also responsible for another of my favorite albums this year, which I wrote about here in June.) Amid the rich texture, you can pick out Ryan Gustafson’s banjo, Phil Cook’s pealing guitar, and Tift Merritt’s backing vocals.
Gedney’s photographs from rural Kentucky are striking for what they are not: Though they depict people without much money, this is no Walker Evans-style catalog of destitution. The Cornett family he captured was homey but not simplistic, earthy but not unintelligent, vulnerable but open. They are photographs of real people, and this is a song about real people. “Heart Like a Levee” is a fitting counterpart.
As a bonus, here’s a live performance, showing Gedney’s photographs, as arranged by Jim Findlay, projected behind the band:
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
“Galveston” is another in a line of lush, cinematic songs by songwriter Jimmy Webb. The original, iconic version by Glen Campbell was released during the Vietnam War, but the last few years make lines like “I clean my gun and dream of Galveston” as topical as you can get. Here’s the original version [above], as well as a cover by David Nail and Lee Ann Womack (the female harmony adds depth to the longing and fear of a young man at war).
Both songs are unabashed, upbeat, and unironic love songs to these iconic American cities. In a time when we are constantly bombarded by messaging that signals that somehow this country is something less than it once was, it is nice to be reminded that we are, in fact, the sum of all of our parts—and that the parts are actually (as Fallows points out) pretty great.
P.S. I only recently noticed the timing of the daily song release ;)
Great picks, though “I Love L.A.” was already featured in TotD (in our series of songs about complicated patriotism) and “City of Immigrants” doesn’t seem to be about a particular city. So I asked the discussion group of Atlantic readers known as TAD for further picks. But first, one of them begs to differ with Adam:
As a proud Angelino, Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” is a sort of theme song and also the soundtrack of all of our many sporting achievements, but I’d hardly call it an “unabashed, upbeat, and unironic love song.” It’s very much a satirical take on the city. It includes lines like, “Look at that bum over there, man, he’s down on his knees.” Newman has said in interviews that he does in fact love L.A., but that song has deeper layers than it what it first appears to be.
Let’s go with “Twin Falls” for the first song in the new series, recommended by a reader in TAD:
I didn’t grow up in Twin Falls, Idaho, but I know it, and I grew up in a town just like it. Built To Spill’s nostalgic song about nostalgia gets it good.
Listen and reminisce for yourself:
If you have a favorite song about a specific place, please send it along with a short description of why you love it so much—and perhaps the place as well: [email protected]. Update from Adam:
I re-listened to “City of Immigrants” and it is true that Steve Earle never actually mentions a specific place, but it is about NYC; it was on Earle’s album Washington Square Serenade, which is (mostly) an extended love letter to the Big Apple.
Regarding “I Love L.A.,” I always took the line about the bum to be a warts-and-all kind of reference. As a teenager stuck in the heartland, that song represented the Los Angeles that I knew from the movies and pop culture. Maybe to the locals it was a theme song, but for this Iowa boy, it was aspirational.
(Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
A reader points to a font of new covers but singles out two:
Regarding your cover series, Bandcamp is a massive resource. There are very mixed results because it’s obviously an outpost for “amateur” musicians (i.e. there are too many punk bands with Ramones covers to count), but there are many, many pros who put things up just for kicks. And they’re usually free.
Example: Anthony Lamarca and his album Songs I Wish I Wrote. His cover of John Cale’s “Big White Cloud”—the original being kind of artsy treacle—is one of my most listened to songs of the past few years. The intimacy of Lamarca’s version is arresting versus the baroque Cale arrangement. Lamarca has backed or supported many big artists and bands—St. Vincent, Spoon, War On Drugs, Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500).
Reader Marc adds to our nascent series on literary songs:
I only noticed this particular Track of the Day theme today, and I immediately went back through the previous entries to make sure you hadn’t run this one already. The Cure’s reference to Camus’s The Stranger is made pretty explicit in the refrain (“I’m alive / I’m dead / I’m the stranger / Killing an Arab”), but back in high school—when I both heard the song and read the book for the first time within a month of each other—I thought the song was a pretty good distillation of the novel’s central themes. Having read it a few more times since then, I now think it’s fairly superficial—but considering that the boys were not far out of high school themselves at the time, I think it holds up pretty well.
“Vincent” is often known by its first line, “Starry starry night,” after Vincent Van Gogh’s most famous painting. While the lyrics contain references to many of the artist’s other works—“morning fields of amber grain,” “flaming flowers that brightly blaze,” and more—I think it’s safe to say The Starry Night is the one work of art that the song best sums up. The unfurling swirls of color in the painting are mirrored by the movements of a wistful melody that seems to ask a question in each line, and the notes of McLean’s acoustic guitar capture the rippling texture of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes.
Update: I set out in writing this note to recommend a musical take on a visual artist, but reader Dave does me one better, with a song that “‘sheds new light’ on that under-appreciated folk singer and songwriter, Don McLean”:
“Vincent” was actually one of his only two songs that broke through into the pop charts. (The other was “American Pie.”) If you’d like a much more obscure track that highlights McLean’s writing talents even more effectively than “Vincent,” try listening to a poignant little ditty that will remind you of the “Mr. Cellophane” song from the musical Chicago. It’s called “Circus Song.”
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
This song from jazz singer Kurt Elling “has been captivating me since I first heard it in 1999,” says reader Shana:
I had heard a different Elling song on the radio, and I went out and bought his Live album, recorded at the Green Mill in Chicago. The album included “My Foolish Heart,” an old standard and what has become one of my very favorite Elling songs. But Kurt frequently changes standards, adds to them, reinvents them ... which is what he did with this one. When I heard his version, I had no idea that he was including writing from St. John of the Cross. (I am so not religious, and when I was “religious,” if you could call it that, it was Jewish, and I was a child). I just fell in love with the song, the way he sang it, the emotive quality, the words and lyrics, and, not least, his astounding voice.
I’m including a link to an article written by someone who probably knows a little more than me about ancient Christian mysticism, and religion in general. Enjoy!
Halfway through the song, the band drifted into one of those breaks that jazz bands do, where everyone gets a chance to play a little solo. Then Hobgood’s piano drifted off, and all that was left was the low throb of the bass and drums. Elling began to sing in his five–octave baritone:
One dark night
Fired with love’s urgent longings
Clothed in sheer grace
I went out unseen
My house being all now still
On that night
In secret for no one saw me
With no other light that the one that burned in my heart
This guided me more surely than the light of noon
To where she waited for me
It was St. John of the Cross. Elling was commingling “My Foolish Heart” with a 16th–century Christian mystic. I felt a sparkler ride up my spine. …
Elling reached the end of St. John, and the band roared back to the finale of “My Foolish Heart.” This was one of the most staggeringly brilliant explorations of John Paul II's Theology of the Body I had ever witnessed. In ten minutes Elling made the point that John Paul the Great made in 500 pages: our bodily love is an icon of the love of God. St. John venturing out in “the mystic night” for God was following the same path trod by the speaker in “My Foolish Heart.”
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
