Saturday Songs - Feb. 18

1. “If I Needed You” – Robby Hecht

During her performance last year at Hamilton College, Liz Longley and her accompanist Gus Berry played a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s best-known tune. Of course, I lost my mind, as I do whenever Townes crops up in unexpected places. Longley was just about the last songwriter I would have expected to land on Van Zandt as an inspiration; more indebted to the confessional singer-songwriter and bubblegum pop schools (and a graduate of Berklee School of Music), it seemed like an odd inclusion in her set.

Afterwards, when I spoke with Berry and Longley about the song, they confessed that they knew next to nothing about the song. They had simply learned it from a friend and fallen in love with it. Of course, I didn’t have the foresight to ask them the name of this friend. The friend turned out to be another lower-level singer-songwriter Robby Hecht. (To be clear, I don’t use ‘lower-level’ as a critical description; it’s only a description.)

Every once in a while, I drop a Townes song into Spotify or on Google and search for covers. Cover versions of Townes songs can be incredibly rewarding; Van Zandt was not the best singer and certainly had no flair for arrangement—you’d need only to listen to the awful string/orchestral accompaniments on his first two albums to know that—but the songs can usually hold their own.

So it was with some excitement that I found this warm, moving rendition of “If I Needed You.” But alongside Hecht’s voice, there was a female, harmonizing part. I listened carefully through the first two verses. Who else could it be other than Liz Longley?

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2. “Right Into Love” – Johnsmith

You can’t get much more ‘everyman’ than this guy. This is the kind of music you might find on a Wednesday night in a bar somewhere in Heartland America. The downside to the ‘everyman’ approach is that it quickly devolves into cliché. Very quickly. I challenge any one of you to listen to one of Johnsmith’s albums all the way through and remember back to three or four different songs. Immediately likable and unproblematic, they blend together from one song to the next.

However, this song is nice because of all the places it namedrops. I always find these ‘place-songs’ irresistible. And it’s not just towns—Johnsmith makes an honest attempt to capture all different elements of this road trip: shooting stars, sleeping bags, patched-up blue jeans, chestnut braided hair. There are alos some neat turns of phrase—“quintessential counterculture hippie pair” being one of them.

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3. “How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep” – Bombay Bicycle Club

I feel a bit compelled to include this song in light of the fact that an Edinburgh College of Art student spent six months designing and filming the stop-motion animation music video for this song. I’ll be honest: I’m a little terrified of the music video, in which a clay-looking man floats through a seeming dream world. It’s a little too much for me. However, the song is fantastic, building weird texture on top of weird texture until midway through the song when the drums explode onto the top of mix and pull all the elements together. Coldplay could probably learn a thing or two from the rise and fall of tension that the band so effectively employs throughout this song.

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4. “Traitor” – Richard Buckner

AllMusic claims that Buckner belongs to the Texas singer-songwriter school alongside the likes of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, but I would offer that Buckner has a little more in common with the late alt-country-rock maverick Chris Whitley, who also liked exploring weird and different textures and dark moods. Buckner never travels quite as far as Whitley did (banjos and electronic ‘noises’ on the same song), but he certainly delves into similar musical ideas. Listen to the interplay between the almost punky, lo-fi guitars and the shimmery keyboards on this song. A lonely slide guitar dips in between those two elements, completing the texture.

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5. Aim & Ignite – fun.

I’ve already raved about this band before—led by Nate Ruess, formerly of The Format—but I’m going to take a few seconds to again put forth the endearing brilliance and, yes, the fun of this band. For what I’m going to assume is a very limited time, their debut album Aim & Ignite is up on Noisetrade for free download. In an earlier Saturday Songs post, I described their song “All The Pretty Girls” as follows:

“Like a manic cross-polination of Electric Light Orchestra and Queen, ‘All The Pretty Girls’ is chock-full of (almost) mechanically perfect harmonies and expertly timed percussion taps and trills and hits à la Queen and once you add in the string parts and the clearly-processed backing vocals (see E.L.O.’s ‘Sweet Talkin’ Woman’), you’ve got a bizarrely fascinating song.”

You should probably download this now.