What song should I listen to, attentively?

 Hi. What obscure song do you think I might appreciate? Or, what song that I might have heard a hundred times, without really hearing, do you think might deserve closer attention?

9:09 PM

Claude responded: Both categories are interesting to think about given what I know of your sensibilities.

Let me offer one from each:

For closer attention: "Eight Miles High" by The Byrds (1966)

You've almost certainly heard this, but it rewards the kind of structural attention you bring to language and systems. Roger McGuinn's 12-string Rickenbacker opening is directly modeled on John Coltrane's modal improvisation — specifically his India from Live at the Village Vanguard. The song is doing something unusual: grafting free jazz logic onto a pop format. The verses are almost conventionally tuneful; the guitar breaks are genuinely avant-garde. It's a seam between two worlds, and once you hear it that way, the tension holds the whole thing differently. Lyrically too — "nowhere is there warmth to be found / among those afraid of losing their ground" — it's a loneliness-in-crowds lyric that lands differently if you read it as being about London's reaction to American fame rather than psychedelia.

Possibly obscure: "Hallelujah" by John Cale (1991)

Not the Leonard Cohen original, and not the Jeff Buckley version everyone knows — the John Cale arrangement, recorded for a Cohen tribute album, which is actually the template Buckley worked from. Cale uses a set of verses Cohen had cut from the original, and the combination produces a song with a completely different emotional shape: more carnal, more ruined, less abstractly spiritual. If you've only ever heard Buckley's version (which is gorgeous but also a bit swooning), Cale's is drier, stranger, more like a man actually recounting something shameful. The etymology of "hallelujah" — hallel (praise) + Yah (God) — working against the lyrical content creates a productive friction the recording inhabits rather than resolves.

I'd be curious which direction interests you more — I have more in either vein.

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