to make your tired heart sing

Eleven songs that makes me ache:

1. Idaho: Alive Again
There's a gorgeous desolation to most of Jeff Martin's music, and the sounds he wrings out of his open-tuned four-string are unlike anything else I've heard. But there's a different kind of resonance to this piano-based piece. Here the lonesome strain in his voice isn't hidden behind layers of guitar and echo — and the result is naked, and haunted, and lovely.

2. The Blue Nile: Family Life
The quiet anguish of Paul Buchanan's voice. His unparalleled skill at capturing the tiny details that transform the everyday into something haunted and timeless. A family splintering, irrevocably broken. A child facing the holidays, and wishing - desperately - that things would just be okay again. The piano. The strings. The way I can't listen to this without getting a lump in my throat.

3. Snow Patrol: An Olive Grove Facing The Sea
I know I'm not alone in feeling the emotional weight of this song.

4. American Music Club: Blue and Grey Shirt
TheWife says this song makes her think of me.

5. Low: In Metal
Like most Low music, there's an undercurrent of warmth and beauty here that rises shimming and lovely to the surface every time Mimi and Alan harmonize. (This is also - by far - my favorite song about having kids.)

6. Talk Talk: I Believe In You
Music doesn't get much more pure and beautiful than this.

7. Jets to Brazil: Sea Anemone
A man sits alone in motel, on the first day of his "second life." He has no home. No wife. Not much of anything at all. He looks at the shower rod, and wonders, "Can it take my weight?" This song is a Raymond Carver story.

8. Posies: Precious Moments
Maybe I'm a sucker for finding this so moving. Fuck it: I am, and it is.

9. Mark Eitzel: If I Had A Gun
I remember the first time I heard this song. It was in the mid-90s - not too long after he released 60 Watt Silver Lining - and he was playing a solo show at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. He played a mix of songs from 60 Watt and American Music Club, as well as a few songs that would later show up on West. Terrific show, and he was in prime form -- mixing heartbreaking music with self-depricating and very, very funny comments between songs. His band was strong, and I remember being happy that Bruce Kaphan (his steel guitarist from AMC) was there playing with him. And then, he started something new... and it was like all the oxygen left the room. His face twisted with anguish, and his voice reached and collapsed, and reached and collapsed, and Kaphan echoed and wailed behind him on the pedal steel, and we all sat there unable to draw in a breath. The intensity was almost unbearable. And then the song ended, and there was a moment of stunned, dead silence, and then applause -- the kind of applause you would imagine from several hundred people who've just been touched and disturbed and changed in an entirely unexpected way.

10. David Bridie: The Last Great Magician
This was custom-made for a rainy night. In a previous life, Bridie was a part of Not Drowning, Waving -- a remarkable Aussie band that made rich, atmospheric music that few people on this side of the world ever got to hear.

11. Soul Whirling Somewhere: S-Qoia
An instrumental from perhaps the most downtrodden band in the world. Michael Plaster is a very, very sad man — and while he's done a fascinating job of documenting his heartbreak across a number of extremely depressing and quite beautiful albums, I find that this little song probably moves me more than any other in his catalog.

There are more. There are always more. But this eleven is a start.

Comments

[jonniker]

Talk Talk is one of the most underrated bands in 1980s lore, in my opinion. Loved them then, loved them now, and that song is indeed just great. Oddly, I feel the same way about Crowded House, and I don't know why they remind me of one another. Sing song-y voice, maybe?

I indeed have a tired heart today. Tired everything this week. And now, uh, new Mp3s to download, which pretty much negates the weight of our earlier conversation. I'm fickle like that.

[TwoBusy]

My Talk Talk love is long and fierce, as well. Hell -- I've even got a framed print of James Marsh's cover from "Laughing Stock" in my office.

Also, I have Mark Hollis' head in my freezer, but the voices say I'm not supposed to talk about that.

[paige]

what a great post idea. i wrote about songs that make me sad on swoon ages ago, but i should revisit the idea, this has inspired me.

[TwoBusy]

(scanning...) Ah, there it is. Hiding bashfully in the bottom right corner of April. Hola, Senor Kozelek!