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The Song Remains Different (+ Ann Powers)

Bruce Robison is a nice guy, albeit married to Kelly Willis, which makes it hard to like him. He wrote the best song ever about ambivalent sibling relations, "My Brother and Me." His brother is Charlie Robison, whose music I don't like quite as much, and who is the husband of Emily from Dixie Chicks.

All of which probably explains how the song "Travelin' Soldier," written by Bruce Robison last milllennium, came to appear on the Dixie Chicks' August 2002 release.

It was a good song on Long Way Home From Anywhere, and it's a great song on Home, the three voices moving in and out of unison in a song stuctured by the invention of absolute loneliness. The song has has only gotten better as times have gotten worse; yesterday morning, it was heartbreaking.

Are there fewer good songs about Vietnam, or poems? The latter, I suspect, since I can never summon any of the former other than "Witchita Vortex Sutra." As for the latter, there are at least two, and perhaps a dozen -- the argument about whether one addresses immediate social reality through form or content comes to a head not in Barrett Watten's serial introjections on the matter, but in Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner" (scroll down to find an audio file here) which may indeed be the most ironic cover ever performed.

Click on the link below to read Ann Powers' Critical Karaoke-ation of "Alfie," by Johnny Mathis.

When I was two, Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote “Alfie” as the title theme for a quite nasty Michael Caine comedy about a Lothario who lays waste to the women of Swinging London. I discovered it later, at ten or so, around the same time I learned the word “existentialism” from a blurb on a paperback copy of Camus’ The Stranger. I tried to digest that story of killing an Arab, but I didn’t get it. I didn’t need to: “Alfie” taught everything about life’s beautiful meaninglessness.

It’s a standard, you must admit -- recorded by hundreds of varying talents, a hit for Cher, Cilla Black AND Dionne Warwick, most recently revived in a Brie-rich interpretation by Ronald Isley. Bacharach says it’s his favorite, and why not. He broke all the pop rules here, or rather, he rewrote them in the style of his first love, the art songs of composers like Darius Milhaud. “Alfie” has no chorus, no refrain really, just an elegantly arcing melody made to be swathed in gossamer strings, a structure as natural as the heart’s pumping, its swells always tempered by an inward pull.

And then there are the words. Hal David has said he wrote them in the voice of one of Alfie’s conquests, the docile romantic played in the film by Paul McCartney’s cast-off girlfriend Jane Asher. But to me “Alfie” is a man’s song, a philosophical statement about the futililty and irresistible purposefulness of romance, the sad refrain of another Camus character, Sisyphus, as he ascends hope’s hill and tumbles down, the eternal believer feeling the rock of human limitation against his shoulder. “His fate belongs to him,” wrote Camus of his tragic hero, and “Alfie” makes the same statement for any lover, revealing passion not as the teen-age outburst of so much pop but as an adult choice, a weary willingness to buy the dream.

The version of “Alfie” I heard as a child was this one by Johnny Mathis, and that was my luck -- the reason I sensed that this was a song into which I could grow. Mathis captures the weltschmerz of “Alfie” better than anyone – his entire career has been a study of restraint, as a tease, a mask and a promise, and here, working within the exquisite constraints of Jack Gold’s production, he turns inward to confront the costs of such self-posession. Holding the song’s climactic note, Mathis enters that space when Sisyphus walks down the mountain and becomes genuinely alive. “Without true love we just exist,” the lyrics shout, but Mathis finally tempers his ardor, “convinced,” as Camus writes, “of the wholly human origin of all that is human.” “What’s it all about?” Such unanswerables carry us through life, like “Alfie’s” melody, which ends like question, unresolved and longing to be asked, to be heard, again and again.

Posted by jane at April 30, 2004 10:23 AM | TrackBack