Never Trust a Hustler

520. STEPHEN STILLS, "Love The One You're With"
Produced by Bill Halverson & Stephen Stills; written by Stephen Stills
Atlantic 2778 1970 Billboard: # 14

521. RYAN ADAMS, "New York, New York"
Produced by Ethan Johns; written by Ryan Adams
Mercury 177242 2002 Did not make pop charts

You're probably tired of hearing me say this by now, but so often it's the music--and, more than anything, the arrangement--that tells the real story of a single. Lyrics are just text, but music is subtext.

Take these two songs. Lyrically, they're very distinct. Both sum up eras: California in the Age of Free Love; NYC just before 9/11. Stills' song, along with Jackson Browne's collaboration with Glenn Frey on "Take It Easy" the following year, is the ultimate expression of the (male) ethos of free love. Supposedly, Stills heard Billy Preston utter the phrase at a party and took it from there. Adams, by contrast, is singing about his struggling days as a musician in Alphabet City during the 1990s. Prominently featured on his first album with a major label, this song is very much his self-conscious farewell to his starving artist days. The fact that the title character of the song gathered a great deal of symbolic resonance between the time Adams recorded it and when it was released, however, made audiences hear it in a very different way.

The thing is, though, for all their lyrical differences, musically, these two tracks are amazingly similar. Yes, Stills has more star power (Crosby, Nash, Rita Coolidge, and Mama Cass on backing vocals, maybe Booker T on organ--on his side, Adams may have had Adam Duritz on backing vocals). Yes, there are slight instrumental differences (the reeds at the end of Adams' track, the amazing turn by Stills on steel drums on his).

But listen. Basically--and I am using that word almost in its literal sense here--both tracks are the same rhythm section and organ layered on top of that same acoustic guitar with the same strumming pattern.

Why? Because it's the same song: a hustler justifies his abandonment of one object of desire for another. In one case, it's a woman; in the other, it's a cultural center. In both cases, these singer-songwriters are making sure the music moves fast enough that the listener won't catch up with their lapses in logic. Musically and personally, they feel, it's simply time to move on.

Was Adams thinking of Stills' song when he recorded his? Maybe. He probably knows the song at least. All I know is, whenever I hear that chord progression played in that specific strumming pattern, I think of the one time that Stills' song hit me hardest: on a subway platform in Boston with my college roommate as he waited for a train to take him to the airport to pick up his hometown girlfriend whom he hadn't yet told about his college girlfriend. We had been talking, but when he realized the exact song that the busker was playing, he broke out in embarrassed laughter. Neither of us said a word about it, but both of us knew that he had been busted: the gods had decided to throw down a song cue.

So yeah, songs like those, I don't care about the words. Those chords in that strumming pattern? For me, that is the exact accompaniment of erotic rationalization.

How Real Can You Get?

233. LEAH ANDREONE, 'It's Alright, It's OK'
Produced by Rick Neigher; written by Leah Andreone & Rick Neigher
RCA 64662 1997 Billboard: # 57

I've loved this song since the first time I heard it, but there's no way I'd ever call it "authentic."

This is a singer-songwriter thing. The master narrative goes something like this: Bob Dylan changed American music forever by taking folk music and making it personal. After him, coffeehouses sprung up all over Europe and North America, but suddenly singers were no longer required to sing musty old Scottish songs. They could sing about the material of their own lives. And they did it alone, just them and a guitar or a piano on a stage. It was personal and it was non-industrial, just an artist talking to a selective audience.

There are a lot of problems with that reductive narrative, more than I can cover in a single post, but let me begin with just two words: Joni Mitchell. For me, Joni Mitchell was the greatest of the singer-songwriters, maybe not as great a songwriter overall as Dylan, but certainly the greatest at writing confessional songs that were both personal and relatable. Again and again, she wrote songs that you can "get" on first hearing, but you can still find new layers in them every time you listen.

But you know what? Mitchell's greatest album, Blue, is impossible without technology. I really felt this with a vengeance a few years back when Ted Turner did one of his tributes to modern songwriters and they featured Mitchell. For nearly all her great songs, those paying tribute couldn't really do justice to them with just one vocalist. All those gorgeous harmonies she laid down? Multitracking. Even when she did everything on an album, it didn't recreate a spontaneous, intimate performance, anymore than Beach Boys' Party! did. Each of Mitchell's albums was a labor of construction, every bit as much as one of her paintings, most of which show a lot more craft than your average Jackson Pollock.

A quarter of a century later, we have Andreone, definitely positioned by her label to be an inheritor of the Mitchell-derived tradition. Writing confessionally? Check. On the first Lilith Fair tour? Check. Huge in France? Check. But, on the other side of the ledger, is she a sellout? She doesn't play all the instruments! She cowrites the song with her producer! She's a fraud!!

I have a simple solution: this isn't folk, or even confession, and it's certainly not truth. It's Pop, and rather accomplished Pop at that. This is a good song about an almost total mental breakdown, but it's too polished to have been written by someone who had ever suffered one. I would bet, though, that she has been around someone who has, because several of the details recorded here seem spot-on. Moreover, no matter what the purists might claim, this song wouldn't have been as good on solo acoustic guitar, because you need the rhythm section and especially the organ to move you through it. And are white confessional folk singers from L.A. allowed to wail like that, as if giving into despair inevitably leads to facing Mecca?

One of the great shames about the reverse snobbism of so much 1990s music culture was that it tried to sell smart Pop as something that it wasn't. This song isn't Truth, but it does have a fair amount of soul. And it's not "upbeat," no matter what the allmusicguide might claim.

Specialized Labor

596. METALLICA, "Turn The Page"
Produced by James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich; written by Bob Seger
Polygram International 566591 1998 Did not make pop charts

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had all these friends--not really cinephiles, but literate, educated friends--who loved John Sayles movies and loved Spike Lee movies. And yes, there were things I liked about all those movies. But far too frequently I found myself wishing that Sayles would be something more than a novelist with moving pictures that didn't move enough, and that Lee would be more than a kinetic cinematician with bumper-sticker dialogue.

After a while, I realized what I really wanted. I wanted Sayles to write a screenplay that Lee filmed--great scenes, great shot composition, all around good movie. I've never believed in the hyphenate in cinema. (Woody Allen's two best screenplays, for example, are the ones on which he had a collaborator.) Some people should just write and some people should just direct and some people should just perform.

I feel that way about pop music too sometimes. Since Dylan and the Beatles, there's been this real emphasis on singer-songwriters, but is it really such a great thing that Lindsay Lohan felt she needed to write songs on her albums in order to be "real"? My favorite single of hers is still "Ultimate," the one she did on the Freaky Friday soundtrack. It almost certainly won't make the cut for this list, but it's catchy and she sells it. It's just about right for her. Thank God she didn't feel the need to rewrite it into a soul-baring ballad about her relationship with her father.

Anyway, this Metallica single is for me the equivalent of my dream Sayles-Lee collaboration. Seger has a better eye for synecdochal (rather than allegorical) detail than Lars and James ever did, but when they sing Seger's lyrics they sound genuinely burnt out. As you may have guessed by now, I'm a big fan of covers, as long as they're the right ones.