Saturday 30 January 2016

Companion(s) Pieces

"Late to the Party" by Kacey Musgraves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM07F5bYRhc
"Let's Get Lost" as performed by Chet Baker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIoquPMcG_E

This first of these two dreamy songs (you can't listen to them and not lose your bearings in the wakeful world) is all female finesse and charm -- good lord, how some girls can sing! When this one hits it a touch higher on you and groove in a sweet country quatrain -- I'm sorry I'm not sorry that I'm/late to the party with you/Oh, who needs confetti/we're already falling into the groove -- you're gonna swoon, I guarantee it, despite the imperfect rhyme. The players are all expert, the lyrics mischievously vivid and true, the voice filled with desirous love for its world of two. If you live to be a hundred, you probably won't hear a sweeter love song.

Chet Baker, I think, is celebrating an anniversary of ecstasy ("this night we found each other"). How else to explain his taking to his horn even before he starts singing? If you can sing without your voice, and if the occasion demands, you've gotta do it. If your voice also knows what it's doing, you get to make a smooth little pearl of a song in which you very politely tell the world to stop bothering you because you've got better things to do, one of which is to attend to the person you're in love with. You get to sing for her (twice!) and play for her (also twice!). You also get to pull off a perfect double rhyme: Let's get lost in a romantic mist/Let's get crossed off everybody's list. You're being brilliant like this, of course, because you're living in a rare dream cast in a romantic mist, population Two.

In the future, when dictionaries catch up, they'll contain unorthodox entries like "anti-nightmare" and will simply provide hyperlinks to these two songs.