The Long Song Monday theme crops up on a number of blogs I read, most frequently over at Swiss Adam's place (though I think it was Drew who started it). I haven't contributed in a good few years, mainly to spare you all too much Jim Steinman. Recently though, I came across something really quite lovely and it's been on recurrent play here, despite its 10+ minute running time.
William Franklin Howard II - or Wee Gee to his mates - was a member of Detroit soul group The Dramatics in the 70s and late 80s. He also released a number of solo records, most notably the 1980 album Hold On (To Your Dreams). I've become rather enamoured with this album lately... particularly that long title track. It was released as a single, but there's no radio edit I can find. The choral refrain reminds me of something else, but I'll be darned if I can put my finger on what. Maybe you recognise it...
Monday's Long Song will have to last all week, I'm afraid as it's family holiday time. I'll be back in time for Snapshots on Saturday.
I could basically put a Mark Kozelek song here every Monday until the end of the year and it would fit the bill... he's not known for his brevity, certainly not in recent years.
It's been a weekend and I haven't the energy to write much more than you'll either love this (maybe 5% of you) or hate it (everybody else). And Mark Kozelek knows that too...
Usually when I offer a long song on a Monday, I get in a massive panic that Drew or The Swede or Walter or even Swiss Adam will have featured it before.
No worry of that this week.
I've written too often before about how I consider Jim Steinman the greatest EPIC songwriter in the history of pop. Nobody else turns it up to 11, breaks the knob off, then sets fire to the record player, like Jim does. Nobody else understands in quite the same way that pop music is both essential to our very being, and yet also utterly, utterly ludicrous. Nobody else has ever trod the line so cleverly between rip-your-heart out sincerity and... taking the piss like nobody's business.
But that's not why I'm posting this here today. Some days you just want to turn the music up in your car and scream out the lyrics of a song like this till your throat is hoarse... because it's the only therapy you can afford.
If you're going to call a song - not to mention a whole album - Masterpiece, then you better be pretty sure of yourself. If you're the Temptations though, at the height of your Motown fame, you can probably get away with it.
This was not intended to be the Temptations' masterpiece though, but that of writer/produce/Motown legend Norman Whitfield. This 14 minute track actually only includes 3 minutes of the Temptations, the rest belongs to Whitfield and Motown session musicians The Funk Brothers. If you're familiar with the extended version of Papa Was A Rolling Stone (which preceded this), you'll know what to expect. Me, I could listen to these guys play all day - 14 minutes goes by in a flash.
I almost didn't have a post today. I realise that's hardly the end of the world, and I've let days gone by without posts before, but this time was different. Because I had posts... only other people had already written then.
Originally I'd planned on doing a Grumpy Old Men / 2019 Contenders post about the new Specials album, but Rigid Digit and John Medd said pretty much everything I have to say about that at the moment (for the record, my opinion falls somewhere in between theirs - RD seems to like it a lot, while John Medd questions whether it's actually The Specials at all, more a reformed Funboy 3 who realised the name of their earlier band would make more headlines).All I can add to that is that while I enjoyed the record, I did feel there were times that it came across as a Guardian journalist's wet dream. The tracklist runs like a checklist of society's ills and sometimes the message seems more important than the music. I don't object to any of the songs on their own, but crammed together on one disc it does feel a bit like being lectured by a 6th former at times. Maybe it's the grumpy old man in me... that's probably why I like this track best of all.
With that idea abandoned, I thought about featuring another Long Song as last Monday morning... until I realised (I had to check!) that Drew had already featured both of them. (I'd already written one of them, but I'll spare you... go read Drew's instead.)
All of which led me to the Bahamas, a late musical discovery from 2018 that may have troubled my end of year countdown if I'd heard it sooner.
Canadian musician Afie Jurvanen, aka Bahamas, has been making records since 2009, but his fourth album, Earthtones, is the first one to be picked up on my radar. He obviously listened to a lot of Prince as a kid but also has a cheerfully tongue-in-cheek approach to his lyrics, reminiscent of John Grant or Father John Misty without the egomaniacal side. Hopefully it'll brighten up your Monday morning (what's left of it)...
I thought I'd jump on Drew's bandwagon this week and have a go at selecting a Long Song to ease us into Monday... just as The Swede, Swiss Adam, Walter and others have also been doing.
Anyway, here's twenty minutes of Ultrasound from their 2016 album Real Britannia, a song that encompasses Mel C's tears, shorts and scuffs and beans for tea, Tiny's dad's nervous breakdown, cross-dressing, sex like you thought only Jarvis could write it, Noggin The Nog, Jimmy Saville's shit-stained covers, 70s nostalgia in the Luke Haines vein... and blue remembered hills.
