Thursday Essay: The Lost Art of Selling a Song

I did something unforgivable last week. No, I wasn't out killing hobos for sport, or doing that thing where I take a Sharpie and write "REAL SPACEMAN HELMET" on dry cleaner bags. I left the house without my phone — and the 15,000 lovingly ripped, exquisitely tagged, and carefully maintained songs it contains.

And my playlists... my precious Brilliant Playlists. 

So I did the unthinkable and turned on the radio where they play the worst thing on Earth: Other People's Music.

The radio was tuned to whatever popular music station my 19-year-old listens to when he borrows my car, which by now is probably more than I drive it. He also listens to music the way his old man does: Not so much turned up to 11, but permanently welded there.

Respect. Truly. 

And Another Thing: Someday, I'll share with you why my rules-based iTunes playlists are Brilliant rather than merely Smart, but I can already tell that this week's essay is going into extra innings.

I'm not a Cranky Old Man about music, or at least I'm trying not to be. After two decades together, popular music and I amicably divorced back when I was still quite young — 22, maybe 23 years old during the early '90s. With the exception of Jesus Jones's underrated "Right Here, Right Now," my GenX peers (listeners and performers alike) mostly acted like the world was ending, when in fact, we'd just won the Cold War without firing a shot, and were about to enjoy a decade of peace and prosperity like no other.

If you know of any other popular music takes actually celebrating that magical time from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, please share in the comments. The popular culture let us down in exactly the way it didn't after World War II, and after 30-plus years, I have a seriously unquenched thirst.

Nobody needed Kurt Cobain and every super-mopey or hyper-ironic act to sing about how pointless and stupid everything was when, in fact, nobody had ever had it better. But that's what listeners seemed to want, so I spent most of my 20s with the radio off, building up my Tony Bennett and bossa nova CD collections.

OK, yes — I exaggerate. I know there were plenty of exceptions, but mostly on the alt-rock fringes where things weren't getting dumbed down so quickly. The overall vibe of the popular music produced by my generation was not for me. All the band names were just too arch — Latex Hobo, The Mumblywumblies, Fart* — and the quality of the songwriting was well into its long, slow descent.

*I made up those band names, but you can hardly tell.

And that is most certainly not me being cranky. There have been a few by-the-numbers studies in recent years, and countless YouTube videos, documenting how popular music since the 1980s has gotten worse. Lyrics are simpler (and often angrier), hooks are sampled instead of created, melodies — when they even exist! — are less complex, and so on. Then there's dynamic range, the difference in loudness between the quietest and loudest moments in a recording or performance. Producers have squeezed it all out of existence, due largely to the demands of radio and streamer programmers who somehow came to believe that quiet moments will make people change stations. 

The lyric of a song is the story. The melody is what hooks you. The range is how they affect you. The beat is what drives you. All four have been so dumbed down that when I got into the car without my iPhone last week, everything on the radio sounded like Dre Khalid Timberlake.

And Another Thing: Music producer/performer/songwriter extraordinaire Nile Rodgers more than once claimed, "Everybody who prayed for the death of disco… when they saw what replaced it — hip-hop — they were begging for disco to come back." For years, I somehow misremembered that quote as, "If I'd have known that disco would be replaced by the drab monotony of hip-hop, I might not have prayed so fervently for its demise." My version is sharper, but Nile's carries far more weight.

I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on today's pop-music phenom, Taylor Swift. I only have two thoughts on her, and only one is germane — but you pay for these essays so I'll give you both. ;)

The first is that if Swift had been born in 1949 instead of 1989, she'd have come in way behind '60s and '70s female singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell (more on her later in this piece), Janis Ian, Carole King, Phoebe Snow, Dolly Parton... I could list at least another half a dozen names before finally saying, "OK, fine — maybe Taylor is tied with Maria Muldaur in 14th place."

And that's after I docked Maria a spot for that line about the camel in "Midnight At The Oasis."

Swift is good, but those ladies set the bar awfully high back in the day.

As a singer, Swift is no powerhouse or great interpreter. But as a songwriter, she understands those limits and writes to suit them. Linda Ronstadt was no great songwriter either (although she did cowrite a few winners), but damn, could she sell a song. If you'd have asked me who should ever cover Roy Orbison's "Blue Bayou" or Smokey Robinson's "Ooo Baby Baby," I'd have said "Nobody ever." And then you'd play Linda's versions, and I'd say, "Except for her. Linda can sing whatever she wants."

Here's my second thought.

People crave good songwriting, and there's so little out there (more on that later, too) that Swift wins (almost) by default. As an all-'round performer, however, I'll say the same thing about Swift that I've often said about Dee Snider or Gene Simmons as songwriters: she's excellent at business. She figured out what has commercial appeal, and her execution shows an almost ruthless skill. There's a reason that Swift is a billionaire while technically better singer-songwriters toil away in smoky clubs. Assuming we still had any smoky ones. I miss those. 

All this is to say that I don't begrudge Swift a moment or a penny of her success. But I do wonder how successful she'd be in an era with tougher competition. 1989 is fine as far as it goes, but it's no Tapestry.

And Another Thing: Yes, I have a fondness for female singer-songwriters of a certain age. Mom raised me on Ellington, Basie, Rufus, and Earth Wind & Fire, because of her love for great jazz and awesome R&B. But as a single woman during the '70s, she also played the hell out of Joni, Carole, and Co. Mom might have been half-insane, but that woman knew good music.

That isn't to say we don't have some fine singers around today, because we certainly do.

I was lucky enough to discover Diana Krall — actually, a girlfriend who sometimes knew me better than I knew myself discovered Krall for me — just as her career took off in the mid-'90s. While Krall would probably insist that she's a jazz pianist who also sings, it was her breathy vocals that hooked me and millions of other fans. Her singing reminds me most of Julie London, who once described her voice as a "tiny whisper of a thing," or words to that effect.

While that might be true, London only had to whisper to make men move mountains.

Sorry, I digress, but Julie will make men do that, too. Among other things.

Then there's k.d. lang — yes, really — who has more than a touch of Rosemary Clooney when she tackles an old standard.

I've written before about Boz Scaggs, who recorded But Beautiful: Standards, Vol. 1 in 2003 and STILL HASN'T PUT OUT Vol. 2. But I won't give up hope until I read his obit.

Anyway, Boz's version of "How Long Has This Been Going On" might just be the best since Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1957 — and Louis had Oscar Peterson accompanying him. 

That's such good stuff, and there's so little of it left in the popular culture. 

Maybe I am a cranky old man, but there's no part of me that believes there's less raw talent out there than there ever was. When I think of the vocal talent stuck on the sidelines today because the songwriting sucks...

Still, the best vocal performances of the last 20 or 30 years seem to have two things in common. One is that they're at their best when interpreting classics from the Great American songbook. Given the current state of popular songwriting, there's no faulting a Boz or a Diana from spending most of their professional effort looking back instead of forward.

The other thing they have in common is that they're all my age or older.

And Another Thing: Even worse than the dominance of dance (bereft of clever lyrics) and hip-hop (music without melody, ugh) on today's airwaves is when some 19 year-old Britney Eilish tries to sing a weepy ballad. To my ears, those youngsters all sound like they're in physical pain, not emotional pain — probably because they're too young to have experienced genuine heartache. 

Years ago, a Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Reader™ offered a pithy explanation for why I could never get into those powerhouse female singers like Whitney Celine Carey, or whatever her name was. "They don't so much interpret songs as they perform vocal exercises," he told me. 

Yes. That's it.

While Toni Blige (seriously, I can never tell these singers apart) might take the word "love" from a lyric and run the O up and down the scales for half an hour before finally getting to the V, Frank Sinatra would sort of gently skate along the V for a moment before drifting off into quiet despair — and taking you with him.

This is the wisdom, the kind of performance, that comes with age.

Sinatra always had a gorgeous voice, maybe even to Bing Crosby's dismay. "Sinatra is the kind of singer who comes along once in a lifetime," he's supposed to have said when Sinatra first appeared on the scene. "Too bad it had to be my lifetime."

But I don't think Sinatra became a great interpreter of song until later in life. As a young man, he wowed audiences with his range, precision, and jazz-like riffs. Before launching his career, Sinatra would hang out at nightclubs, and then go home and practice making his voice do what Tommy Dorsey did with his trombone. 

"It was all from the horn players. I got it from Tommy Dorsey, from Jack Teagarden, from Billie [Holiday]," Sinatra said. "I wanted the voice to be a horn."

When I think of Sinatra, though, I think of the somewhat older performer who moved rather than wowed. That Sinatra would rip his heart out, present it to you on a silver platter, and make you love it. And that Sinatra didn't begin to emerge until he was nearly 40 and his turbulent marriage to Ava Gardner turned sour.

The singer who recorded "This Love of Mine" in 1941 with Dorsey was not the same performer who recorded it in 1955 for In The Wee Small Hours. 

Compare and contrast.

The first one is for slow dancing with your honey. The second one is for drowning your sorrows.

Pass me the Jack Daniel's and a Marlboro Red, would you?

Those two recordings show the difference between singing a song and selling a song — and there's something about age that can take a talented singer and turn them into a powerful performer.

I have a favorite example of just that: the two Joni Mitchells. Or, if you'll allow me to be overly arch, let's look at both her sides, now.

Here's the original version of Mitchell's signature song, recorded at age 25 or 26 in 1969.

In Mitchell's first version — which I quite enjoy, FWIW — she sounds like a sharp young woman who thinks she knows a thing or two about how the world works.

Now listen to the way she re-recorded it, 30 years later. She sounds like a woman who only now, in middle age, finally understands how the world really works. It's the kind of lesson that comes with pain and a few scars.

Trying that take at 26 would have been impossible — or at least foolish. It just wouldn't have worked. But by her mid-'50s, Joni had left her glib, younger self far behind.

I hit my late 50s in a few months, so I know something about how she feels. But since my singing voice at any age can drop livestock — and I'm talking cattle here, not chickens or goats — I limit my artistic growth to solo performances in the car, windows rolled up tight.

But it's the age issue I keep coming back to, and a lament that maybe video really did kill the radio star. Popular music has always been youth-oriented, but MTV shifted focus from the music to the looks and the dance moves. 

I'd like to think that Swift could mature like Mitchell did, but why would she when concertgoers pay good money to see her perform music videos on stage? If that's what audiences want, great, but it doesn't leave much breathing room left for talented singers to grow into powerful performers.

Great singing — understanding a lyric, playing with the melody, and selling a song — isn't about vocal gymnastics and it certainly isn't about dazzling dance moves. Those have their places, and you can't think of Michael Jackson without thinking of performances like "She's Out Of My Life," and him doing the Moonwalk.

A great performer doesn't just hit the notes; they move the soul. But if the history of popular music teaches us anything, it's that a singer only truly learns to move people after they've been knocked down a few times by lives lived large, not just songs sung well.

Last Thursday: Meet the Monsters