Weird Tales 359. Conrad Williams
from the eleventh century certainly sounds weird to Western ears, but that’s only because of different musical DNA. And some forms of musical weirdness fade over time, as they are absorbed into the cultural mainstream. The tonal experiments of Igor Stravinsky or even Richard Strauss were considered horrifyingly odd by listeners at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, as was the explosion of sixteenth and thirty-second notes introduced into jazz by Charlie Parker in the late 1940s. But to listeners today all three musicians are perfectly within the realm of the normal.
This tendency of musical advances to be absorbed into mainstream culture is also a good reason to leave purely instrumental music outside our consideration.
Enough exclusion. What makes for good weird listening? Well, contemporary pop is full of gems that sneak up on you and give you a swift jolt. Pleasant melodies can hide strange and unexpected lyrics. I had been listening to Fleet Foxes’ eponymous album for the better part of a year before a friend suggested I listen a bit more carefully to the lyrics of “White Winter Hymnal.” I did so, and now Brueghel-Bosch mashup images leap into my mind every time I hear the song, and not just because of that album’s cover art. More to the point, the imagery still shocks despite my ongoing familiarity with the song. (Their new album, Helplessness Blues, sounds rather less like Gregorian chant on acid but still contains some pleasant blows to one’s equilibrium: check out “Battery Kinzie” and the compounded weirdness of “The Shrine/An Argument”. And “White Winter Hymnal” isn’t the only song on the earlier album worthy of consideration: give a listen to “Your Protector”.)
Randy Newman, one of the greatest American songwriters of the past fifty years, penned a disturbingly weird song with “Sail Away.” It seems all sunny in its bucolic praise of America, but the sunshine disappears like a psychotic’s smile once you realize to whom those cheerful lyrics are being sung.
The equally bucolic “Rainmaker,” by Harry Nilsson, packs a lovely dark-fantasy punch in its final verse and coda. The frothy effervescent melody of his “Daybreak” hides that its narrator is a vampire who—we learn in the last lines—will only be saved by an unlikely total eclipse.
Then we have Tom Waits: Even in his earlier works you practically have to make an effort to avoid the weird. By now, with his voice a mechanical wasteland of whisky and cigarettes and his tastes in instrumentation spinning somewhere out in the Kuiper Belt. (Think it’s weird hearing a didgeridoo in the Celtic folk of Coyote Run? Wait until you’ve heard the pump organs and marimbas that Waits adopted as far back as the eighties), Waits’ very existence constitutes a sub-genre of the weird.
There is no shortage of Waits songs that meet our criteria, so you could pretty much pick an album and let loose. I’ll draw your attention to three, however. “Poor Edward” (from the theatrical production Alice proclaims its weirdness right from the first verse and just keeps getting weirder as it progresses. “Swordfishtrombone” (from the album of the same name) spins a demented tale of a veteran who may or may not be a victim of something supernatural (or who may just be flat-out mad and no buts about it); this song reminds me, in some ways, of Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy,” and a more cheerily psychopathic couple of minutes you’re unlikely to ever experience; the kick in the final verse is definitely weird. (Another fine weird Waits tune is “’Tain’t No Sin,” from the theatrical presentation The Black Rider, but Waits didn’t write this one; it’s by Walter Donaldson, who also wrote “Makin’ Whoopee” if you can believe it.)
My favourite weird Waits song from the huge number I’ve heard—and I’ve heard scarcely a tenth of the man’s work; he’s been writing songs for more than forty years—is “Potter’s Field” (from Foreign Affairs), a long, half-sung film noir from the dark side with poetry that dazzled me when I first heard it back in my radio days thirty years ago, It continues to amaze me today whenever it pops up on my iPod. Waits seems to specialize in this sort of underbelly darkness (hear also “$29.00” from Blue Valentine) but for my money “Potter’s Field” is one of the best things in that long career.
Kate Bush is another songwriter who has embraced the weird side from the very beginning of her career. “Experiment IV” (The Whole Story), with its careful descent into Frankensteinian madness, or “Get Out of My House” (The Dreaming), inspired by Kubrick’s film of The Shining, are the obvious choices here. But listen to “Wuthering Heights” (The Kick Inside) while ignoring the title; the otherworldliness of Cathy’s need to be let in is definitely high on the weird-meter, especially when the lyrics are matched with Bush’s vampire-on-helium voice.
“Wuthering Heights” brings the whole sub-genre of Mad Love songs to mind, a cavalcade of the strange that goes back to the “dead teenager” songs of the early sixties and probably beyond. I can’t think of a more bizarre manifestation of love than the bubblegum invitation to cannibalism that is the sprightly jangle of “Hungarian Love Song” by The Jazz Butcher :
I’ll be your breakfast
I’ll be your dinner
You won’t get hungry
You won’t get thinner
Don’t take offense now
Don’t think me rude
But if you need me
I’ll be your food
A completely different sort of creepiness is engendered by Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession,” or “Every Breath You Take” by the Police. In both cases the dangerous strangeness of the lyrics is compounded by the inexplicable fact that so many people seem to think that these are songs suitable to play to a loved one. A love song from a stalker is not the sort of thing to play to your new spouse at the wedding, people.
Although some may feel “I’m Not in Love,” by 10cc is a weird love song, I would disagree. (It is one of the best-produced pop songs of all time, however.) Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, who wrote that song, recorded more suitably weird songs in their post-10cc career: “Under Your Thumb” is a classic ghost-story song, for instance. My favorite weird tune of theirs, though, is “An Englishman in New York” (not to be confused with Sting’s more gentle song of the same name). I can’t begin to describe the oddness of the Manhattan being sung about here; all I can say is, get on board and fasten your seat belts.
Devoted collectors of paraphernalia out walking the rock
Battle and bitch for the ultimate kitsch of a crucifix clock
Two miniature Romans, running on rails
Appear every hour and bang in the nails
I’ve got to have it, Christ, I gotta be the first on our block
And if you find a crucifix clock, I’d love to have it for my office...
There are probably hundreds or even thousands of other pop songs that fit into the weird straitjacket, but in our remaining space, we should acknowledge the debt that musical weirdness owes to the past. And not just the recent past, either, though Robert Johnson wrote some impressively weird blues songs in the 1930s, most of which have been covered by modern musicians (“Crossroads” by Cream and “Me and the Devil Blues” by Eric Clapton); the nineteenth-century folk and field song “In the Pines” was covered by Nirvana during that band’s 1993 “Unplugged” appearance on MTV.
The cornerstone of all popular weird music, though, is the folk music of the British Isles, as written down in the late nineteenth century by the indefatigable Francis James Child. There are 305 songs in Child’s collection, and at least a tenth of those are supernatural in content.
And most of these have been recorded within my memory. There was an electric folk revival in the UK in the late sixties and early seventies, and bands such as Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and their various spin-offs seem to have left no Child behind. The coverage continues today, with contemporary groups like Coyote Run and Great Big Sea helping themselves to the mother lode.
Most of the Child ballads are fairly obvious in their weirdness. “The Two Magicians” is an escape song, with one of the magicians shape-shifting to get away from the other,