Music for the ADD Generation, Part 2

Jenny Owens Young--"First Person" (mp3)
Yellow Fever--"iMac" (mp3)
Richmond Fontaine--"Kid Steps Out Into The Road" (mp3)
The Weakerthans--"(manifesto)" (mp3)
Eliott Smith--"Georgia, Georgia" (mp3)
Big Star--"I'm In Love With a Girl" (mp3)
Warren Zevon--"Jesus Was a Cross Maker" (mp3)


Push the "play" arrow on the first song on the playlist above. Sit back. Close your eyes. Listen all the way through the whole list. Just over 10 minutes worth of music. Seven songs. Quick songs. Good songs. All short. All different.

Sixteen months ago, and long before Bottom Of The Glass achieved its current status as one of the "million most popular" blogs on blogspot.com, I posted an entry about Really Short Songs.

My conditions were these:

1. The song lasts less than 2 and 1/2 minutes.

2. The song is a stand-alone song, not a transitional song in a rock opera or other thematic setting. For example, the Who's "Do You Think It's Alright" or Pink Floyd's "Goodbye, Cruel World" both qualify in terms of their brevity, but they lose both meaning and appeal out of context. Personally, though, because it tells the whole story, I think "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" qualifies.

3. The song must feel like a complete song, not an incomplete idea, not a snippet of something longer, not a reprise version of another song.

4. If #3 is accomplished, when you listen to the song, you don't realize how short it really is because it has done so much in so little time.

5. The song has vocals. Instrumentals don't count, cool though they are.

I was looking through my Ipod playlist of "Really Short Songs" yesterday, adding some new ones, etc. when I took a look at the list. There were 386 songs on the playlist!

So, I got to thinking I'd better tighten things up. Let's face it. I was wrong. Songs that clock in at somewhere in the two minute plus range are short songs, but they're not "really short songs." So I'm lowering the boundary. Really short songs must be less than two minutes long. Special props, of course, if they're less than one minute.

On to the songs: you've got Jenny Young laying out a whole relationship in about 40 seconds. As you listen to the song, you won't believe there's any way she can get out of it; you think it's just going to cut off. But it doesn't. The Yellow Fever ditty that follows uses the chorus and subject of the song as its underlying rhythm. Richmond Fontaine's "Kid Steps Out" has one of the great opening lines: "Kid steps out into the street with three m-80's taped to his forehead and lights the fuse." I've put the songs in order from shortest to longest, so that by the time you get to the Weakerthans and Eliott Smith, their songs are clocking in well under two minutes, but are still 60 or more seconds longer than Jenny Owens Young. They sound fleshed out, expansive, normal. It's funny what the mind will do. Bloggers love Big Star. I love Big Star. "I'm in Love with a Girl" is simply a classic. Finally, Zevon goes into Quention Tarantino mode, reinventing Jesus as a bit of a Western Hero. The heavenly female voices between verses seem almost indulgent in this 1:47 gem.

The world of really short songs is a skewed world. You've got to make compromises, take shortcuts, leave things to the imagination when you working on such a small stage. I like when musicians give themselves restrictions or are still in touch enough with their own art that they realize that different ideas can have radically different sizes.