Songs I Think Are Beautiful

I was thinking about my sense of musical aesthetics (or lack thereof)... puzzling over why I think some music is beautiful when other people might not (Neil Young), yet am left cold by music that is inarguably pretty (Sarah Mclaughlin).

And I blame my parents. They tend to listen to a different set of musicians and genres than me, but they exposed me to two key musical influences: 1) Randy Newman and 2) Stephen Sondheim. Those two gentlemen are masters of the sweet melody and the not-so-sweet subtext. Randy Newman can sing beautifully of slave ships and broken marriages, and Sondheim writes about thwarted loves, regretted choices, dead-end lives, and ways of life that have been swept away. He's covered everything from the opening of Japan to the West in the 1800s to the inner lives of presidential assassins.

The songs I like, while they are different genres (folk/rock/alternative/country?), are often similarly somewhat melancholy, even a little twisted. A new favorite of mind, Richard Thompson, gets inside the mind of a religious fanatic in "Outside of the Inside", Dar Williams waxes rhapsodically about life by the sea and then gets slapped down and told to get over herself by an actual fisherman, in "The Ocean", Kirsty Maccoll gets nostalgic about an illicit affair in "Titanic Days", and... I'm still not sure what "Pineapple Head" is about, but those Crowded House boys sure sang it like they meant it. Even a beautiful song about how we are all worlds within worlds has the improbably title "You Little Shits." Why? Why not?

I think my ears have been trained to need a hint of a sour note, not just unleavened sweetness. Sometimes pretty is just too... pretty. Sorry, Sarah M.! (This probably also explains why I'm not that thrilled by Andrew Lloyd Webber either.)