Seven Song Spin: La La Land
"La" isn't just the sixth note in the do-re-mi solfège—it's also probably the most popular vocable in all English lyrics, followed closely by "do," "da," "na," and variations of these with a "sha" prefix. For this week's playlist, I've highlighted some favorites that throw up their hands and say "la."
This complete playlist can be found here.
I see seven towers: U2's beautiful "Running to Stand Still" uses "la la" not blithely but as a kind of prayer chant, as if they can't find the words to encompass the suffering depicted in the song, until, in the final chorus, they suddenly can: "She will suffer the needle chill/She's running to stand still" take the place of the la las as if they'd been waiting in the wings for their entrance.
With her electric heater: Elvis Costello fanhood didn't take with me immediately; it took the smooth pop sounds of Punch the Clock to win me over, and the doo-wop-esque throwaway "The Element Within Her" was for a time a favorite of mine. I still quite like it, in part for the way minor chords keep haunting its major-key bounce, also for one choice lyric: "He was a playboy, could charm the birds right out of the trees/Now he says, 'What I do with these?'"
Pure vocalese: Milton Nascimento's take on "La Bamba" (on the same record I cherish for his River Phoenix tribute) is as beautiful as anything he's ever done, also haunting by minor keys and children's choruses. It's a whole sonic world.
The city's ripped backsides: I'd heard Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" before but it veered back onto my radar as part of a response to my recent post on memorable vocal variations, as Pop takes the final la las up a notch in a way other singers apparently get to too early in their covers (Siouxsie's take was cited).
I have to turn the steam back down: I used a "la la" chorus on this original tune, "The Lamb I Am," to suggest that we all come into this world nameless—that we may be known as distinct individuals by the divine, but not necessarily in any human language. I think of the cryptic epigraph that prefaces Brideshead Revisited: "I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they." Many have taken that to be Evelyn Waugh's disavowal of the work's autobiographical origins; I've always read it, given the book's theological underpinnings, to be saying something much more profound about identity under God. We are breath and spirit; our true names are preverbal, postverbal, an ecstasy of syllables.
That magic smile: Another song I caught on the Phoenix R&B station back in the 1980s was Pieces of a Dream's ebullient "Say La La," which I mainly love for the bluesy turn of its main synth hook, but which as a whole still has the ease of a light summer breeze.
Down the shore everything's all right: The best song Bruce Springsteen never wrote, "Jersey Girl," is ostensibly Tom Waits's tribute to his wife and collaborator Kathleen Brennan. It's technically a "sha la la" song, but the judges will allow it.
With her electric heater: Elvis Costello fanhood didn't take with me immediately; it took the smooth pop sounds of Punch the Clock to win me over, and the doo-wop-esque throwaway "The Element Within Her" was for a time a favorite of mine. I still quite like it, in part for the way minor chords keep haunting its major-key bounce, also for one choice lyric: "He was a playboy, could charm the birds right out of the trees/Now he says, 'What I do with these?'"
Pure vocalese: Milton Nascimento's take on "La Bamba" (on the same record I cherish for his River Phoenix tribute) is as beautiful as anything he's ever done, also haunting by minor keys and children's choruses. It's a whole sonic world.
The city's ripped backsides: I'd heard Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" before but it veered back onto my radar as part of a response to my recent post on memorable vocal variations, as Pop takes the final la las up a notch in a way other singers apparently get to too early in their covers (Siouxsie's take was cited).
I have to turn the steam back down: I used a "la la" chorus on this original tune, "The Lamb I Am," to suggest that we all come into this world nameless—that we may be known as distinct individuals by the divine, but not necessarily in any human language. I think of the cryptic epigraph that prefaces Brideshead Revisited: "I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they." Many have taken that to be Evelyn Waugh's disavowal of the work's autobiographical origins; I've always read it, given the book's theological underpinnings, to be saying something much more profound about identity under God. We are breath and spirit; our true names are preverbal, postverbal, an ecstasy of syllables.
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