song obsession friday! (for the week ending November 14)
Song obsessions are those songs that we listen to on repeat. I noticed that my obsessions are often a week long. I also thought that other people might have similar obsessions. I’ve collected a panel of a few like-minded individuals and gotten their “song obsessions of the week.” Quite often it’s easy to explain why the song is good; it’s much hard to explain why we’re obsessed. Maybe you’ll become obsessed with one of these.
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Adrian (me):
Alabama Sacred Harp Singers – David’s Lamentation (mp3) (buy)
On Monday night I went over to Berkeley to try some Sacred Harp singing (more about that style previously). More about that later.
It turned out to be a lot of fun and we went through a lot of songs in the course of the evening but the one that stuck with me was “David’s Lamentation”, particularly the part that goes: “And as he went, he wept and said ‘Oh my son!’” It was just stuck up my head all week. I think it’s how dramatic that part of the song is–the pause and full dark harmonies right at “Oh my son!”–that got me repeating that over and over.
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Keith:
Fred Lane & Ron Pate’s Debonairs – White Woman (mp3) (buy)
Well, if oddball is the theme they don’t get more curious than Fred Lane. Shrouded in mystery, Fred’s work magically appeared in re-issue form on the Shimmy Disc label in the mid-80’s, as he mated various 60’s era styles with his unsettling perspective. In this particular song Fred infuses the details of a rather banal event with importance, then tosses in a few more left-field lines to make it even more questionable. If your sense of humour is more conceptual than literal many repeat listens are guaranteed.
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Rob:
King’s Singers – the Oak and the Ash (mp3) (buy)
This recording was an obsession a few weeks running last month. As always, the King’s Singers carry the arrangement (in this case, Gordon Langford’s) impeccably. I love how the harmonization works to temper an otherwise bombastic short-short-long rhythmic pattern without wholly sanding off its folksy edge.
