Deep Voices #28 - Place Songs
Leonia to Lahore, San Pedro to St. Croix
Deep Voices #28 on Apple Music
In bed a few months ago, deep in quarantine malaise, I started talking to my wife about a vacation we took in Jamaica four years ago. It began as a reminiscence and turned into a narration. “Now we are admiring the turquoise water,” I said. “Now we are floating in that water.” I wanted fantasy, but it came off like a low-rent guided meditation. I should have just pulled out my iPhone and looked at sunset pictures from the trip. Or put on some reggae.
I’m a very literal person. As a writer I feel like my job is to take the very loose experience of being alive and distil it specifically. A musician’s job is arguably the opposite, so the results can be imperfect when an impressionistic artist has to use words. Putting together playlists for Deep Voices, I’ve begun to notice the tropes of song names, especially for more abstract music. There’s a lot of songs named things like “Clouds” or “Mountain Fog.” Those traits of nature are good reference points for wafting sound, if generic. I’d like to go to a place, not the idea of one. Listening to a song about a place is like getting injected with someone else’s memory. That feeling is more than welcome in a time of sentience.
All the songs on this week’s playlist are named after places. Some of those are big, like Mauritania and some are small, like West 8th Street. My favorite title is “Leonia,” a boisterous house track by Physical Therapy named after a town in New Jersey. It’s a place I’ve never been to, but never imagined had much of a rich terrain. But this song is honestly very banging. They party like this in Leonia?
It was so hard to narrow this playlist down to an hour of music. Songs about suburban Australia, about an island forest in Japan, about Antarctica all got cut. This playlist is not intended to be a complete overview of the world of music by any means, just a good set of songs with a little bit of a theme. For fun, I have marked the location of each place on a Google Map and linked the YouTube video for each song, so you can zoom around a street view of the wetlands while listening to “Everglades.” Bon voyage!
Playlist notes:
My favorite place mentioned in a song is Avenue of the Americas, better known as Sixth Avenue. It was given the fancier of the two names by mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1945, intending to draw attention to New York’s role as a global city. Apparently it didn’t work, as no one calls it that, and I doubt if anyone ever really did. Except maybe Jonathan Vance, singer and lyricist of the Baltimore band Moss Icon. On their 1994 song “Moth,” Vance narrates a stroll through New York. “Walking along on down the Avenue of the Americas/my footsteps, two eyes, and a head/My footsteps stepping between the shattered sunlight that is coming between the buildings.” In college, visiting the city, I looked up while wandering in the West Village and, at the intersection of 8th Street and 6th Avenue, where the Barnes and Noble used to be, I saw the Avenue of the Americas sign and thought of the song. I’ve associated that intersection with the lyric for 20 years now.
The way Vance sings is essentially to ignore the band’s music. Over aggressive guitar noodling, Vance talks, occasionally screams, these long, loose narratives like a neurotic slam poet. When he says he is walking down the Avenue of the Americas, he says it with wonder. It sounds like the most important place in the world. He does justice to LaGuardia’s vision. I have no idea what any of it has to do with a moth though.
Because of my own stupid rule for this playlist that each song has to be named after a specific place, I didn’t include “Moth.” But I realized that on that same record, Moss Icon has a song called “Guatemala.” Vance sings in a similar herky jerky style. “In the Amazon, there is no one there to hear/Sing strong.” It might be about the long civil war in Guatemala that was nearing an end when the song was recorded in the mid ’90s. But it might be about a proto-Eat Pray Love journey to Central America. There’s no mention of Guatemala in the song.
Jazz pianist Stanley Cowell passed away at the end of 2020. His career was long and varied, and is as notable for his playing as it is for his entrepreneurship in starting the record label Strata-East. The label released records by Pharaoh Sanders and Gil Scott-Heron, as well as Cowell’s own music, including his mutli-piano group, Piano Choir. The song I’ve included here, “St. Croix,” is from his sweetly named 2000 album, Dancers in Love. I love the way Cowell uses his two hands so independently, with the quickly repeating theme playing on the low notes, and an exploration happening with the high notes. About halfway through, he switches from piano to kalimba, and the song opens up, as the drummer hits some loping rim shots. It’s a very sneakily adventurous song. Cowell’s catalog is long and rich and well worth exploring. Giovanni Russonello has a great overview of his work in his recent NY Times obituary.
If you’re a punk fan, San Pedro is notable for one thing: being the hometown of the Minutemen, the jammy trio that started the career of bass player Mike Watt, a notable journeyman who has played with everyone from Nirvana to Kelly Clarkson. Though prolific in their short career, Minutemen’s journey ended when frontman D. Boon, Watt’s best friend, was killed in a car crash at 27. I’ve included a track from Minutemen’s 1984 album, Double Nickels on the Dime, a short and loud war protest song called “Viet Nam.” I’ve also included a more tender track from Dos, Watt’s duo with his one-time partner, late era Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler. “Dream of San Pedro” is an instrumental bass duet that I can’t help but hear as an elegy for Watt, despite being released in 1996, 12 years after his death. It’s not a sad song, but it is a somber one, poignant if playful. Unfortunately not too much of the Dos catalog is instrumental and the vocals only serve to cover the intimacy of their playing, so this track and its bareness is extra special.
Techno producer’s Hiro Ama’s “Letter From Lahore” is a beautiful song, with some ecstatic keyboard playing that imitates the quickness of a guitar solo. There’s a dusty vocal sample, shuffling percussion, and a steady and quick hi-hat ding propelling the song. There’s so much motion I wondered if Hiro Ama was from Lahore, sending out frenetic energy from a long quarantine. After some light investigating, I found out he’s actually from London. Giving an interview to the site the Quietus last year, he said that the EP “Letter From Lahore” comes from is “a mixture of feelings like sadness, loneliness, confusion, hope and nostalgia.” He wrote the song as a tribute to the city after his travels as a teenager. “I didn't want to forget this incredible trip and this quarantine makes me want to travel somewhere far, so I made this song.” I mean no offense, but that is a sentence that communicates so much less than the song. It reminded me of what I said to my wife about Jamaica. Such base human desires for connection and exploration made pat by articulation. As someone simultaneously obsessed and plagued by words, it’s starting to make sense why I like instrumental music so much.