What's Your Favorite Song?

On the McSweeney's Web site, they ran a series of short essays celebrating favorite songs. I thought it might be interesting to do the same here. It's also a good way to keep BFS active without relying too heavily on me to generate content. Your encouraged to post your own essay on your favorite song. It doesn't have to be as long as what I've written, but it would be nice if it were as maudlin and overblown. Or you can play it straight. Just don't reveal any private personnel matters that might get me into trouble.

Drownin' in this City

I first heard “Within Your Reach,” the last song on the Replacement’s Hootenanny album, while in college. It wasn’t until I bought the album in 1989 (and yes I do mean album, as in LP, as in pressed vinyl) that the power of the song really struck me. The song has soul. Deep, indelible soul.

Here on this classic post-punk album, amidst a collection of drunken and rollicking numbers, was an aching ballad that was more real than any song I had ever heard. Paul Westerberg recorded the song by himself with just a guitar, an effects pedal, and a cheap drum machine. The chords ascend and then descend throughout the song, creating a ethereal numbness to accompany the lyrics that are as pointed and direct as pointed daggers being directed at you.

Ah, the lyrics. Simple, yet powerful and perfect. Angst wrapped in anger topped off with a dollop of self-pity. Resignation climaxing in a wail of defiance. The perfect song for anyone who didn’t get the girl, knows they’ll never get the girl, still wants the girl, and wants her to know it and somehow feel bad about it, but of course she won’t feel bad about it because she’s probably into Richard Marx.

The lyrics play off the classic R and B song, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” But while that song is optimistic that true love will conquer all, the singer here is stricken helpless by love. He lacks all perspective with no hope of traversing natural barriers that metaphorically separate him from love.

“Reach” found some success after it was included in the soundtrack to the movie Say Anything. Fans of the film will remember that it played as the Lloyd and Diane sat pensively on an airplane, waiting to set-out on their life together. Totally inappropriate.

It’s said that Cameron Crowe, the movie’s director, had originally intended for the song to play during the movie’s most memorable scene. When the recently dumped Lloyd stands beneath Diane’s bedroom window, rain beating down upon him as a baptism on his soul, he holds a boom box defiantly over his head. The song that plays is meant to convey the contents of his tortured soul. “Reach” would have captured perfectly the torment that was welling up inside of him.

The movie’s producers probably recognized that this was the money scene, however, and wanted something by a more established artist to drive sales of the soundtrack. So instead we heard Peter Gabriel “In Your Eyes”, a good-enough song, I suppose, but ultimately unsatisfying knowing what could have been.

“Reach” also received extended play on my answering machine during the early- to mid- nineties, a fifteen-second snippet of which preceded the standard “leave a message” request. It annoyed friends, confused relatives, perhaps even vexed a telemarketer or two, but it never achieved the desired effect – to impress girls with my sensitivity and outsider taste in music. For girls to have been impressed, they would not only have had to have been Replacement fans, or at least like the song, but they would have also have had to call. Few did. And thus the song’s pathos touched me even deeper.

The song obviously doesn’t speak to me today as it did then. I no longer play it five or six times in a row. Maturity has a way of wising-up a rebel without a clue. But it is still one of the most powerful songs that I have ever heard. And if you don’t get it, then you ain’t got no soul.