My Favorite Type of Song
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I just found out that one of my all-time favorite songs is about jerking off.
Ever since I first heard the twangy guitar plucks of “My Name is Jonas” pouring out of Guitar Hero III as a teenager, I’ve been enamored with Weezer’s eponymous blue album. Over the course of the intervening decade, the band has been a constant source of edgy adolescent tunes, ironic memes, questionable artistic decisions, and unexpected comebacks. It’s not like I’d never heard of Weezer by 2007 (I’d heard “Beverly Hills” on the radio and “Island In The Sun” in a movie or two), it’s just that I didn’t know the band was actually, well, you know, good.
Once I gave The Blue Album a listen in full, I “got” Weezer almost immediately. The ever-shifting mixture of Cars-esque power pop, feel-good surf tunes, and pop culture geekery were beguiling to my teenage brain. I got to become familiar with iconic singles like “Say It Ain’t So,” “Buddy Holly,” and “The Sweater Song,” all only my own, devoid of hype, expectations, or over-exposure via radio play. With lyrics that referenced X-Men and idolized (arguably) the least-cool member of KISS, I could tell this was an album tailor-made for a teenaged Taylor. More importantly, I could tell it was better and far more artistic than songs like “Beverly Hills” had led me to believe.
For me, the cherry on top of The Blue Album came in the form of its final track. After nine songs of catchy hook-filled power pop, the group wraps the record up with the absolutely epic eight-minute closer “Only In Dreams.” This song blew me away the first time I heard it, and it continues to blow me away every subsequent time I listen to it.
“Only In Dreams” begins with a solitary bassline and light cymbal taps. An acoustic guitar joins in, then a snare. An electric guitar starts plucking away, and suddenly the entire band has taken up the melody without you even realizing it. After about a minute, a remorseful Rivers Cuomo enters the track and quickly establishes the stakes: “You can't resist her, she's in your bones / She is your marrow and your ride home.” He soon continues, further illustrating how omnipresent this figure is, singing, “You can't avoid her, she's in the air (in the air) / In between molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide.” Suddenly a whir of distortion kicks up, and the entire group bottoms out into a swaying, distorted borderline-shoegaze riff.
Over the course of a verse and another couple of choruses, the lyrics paint a picture of romance, dancing, and adolescent clumsiness. Cuomo sings the title seven times, then lets the riff do the rest of the talking. The lyrics wrap up about four minutes into the song, and the back half of the track contains a beautiful, cresting instrumental that rises and falls with the power of a post-rock song. It’s a commanding display of emotion, musicianship, and artistry… Then I found out it was about nutting.
That’s right, the song itself is meant to depict a dream where our hero is meeting this unnamed woman, dancing with her, then, you know, getting it on. This means the back half of the track; the build-up, the rises and falls, the constantly-beating drum, are all meant to be an auditory depiction of the narrator achieving climax. Hmm.
See, I’ve always liked this song for its format more than anything. It spends the perfect amount of time telling a compelling (if not a little vague) emotional story. Then, the band begins this instrumental jam that flows so seamlessly from the narrative. You don’t even realize how long this instrumental passage is until the song finally comes to a close, and you look down to see that eight minutes have passed. The song is segmented into these two beautiful acts that tell a story and then allow you, the listener, to fill in the rest. It’s about as creative and interactive as music ever gets.
It took me until very recently to realize that many of my favorite songs share this exact same format. Perhaps two of the most famous examples would be “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” by The Beatles and “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab For Cutie. Both of these songs begin with simplistic instrumentals followed by a relatively straightforward bout of lyrics. Most importantly, both pieces are capped off with an instrumental back half that repeats the same measure over and over again to an almost hypnotic effect. In the case of The Beatles, “I Want You” is practically the template for Stoner Rock as we know it today. The song features a sludgy, slow-moving, and distorted riff that could perfectly accompany the slow-paced head bobbing of any given doom metal show. Meanwhile, “Transatlanticism” is a piano-led ode to long-distance relationships that begins with a remorseful delivery and dream-like logic. The song gradually builds underneath a repetition of “I need you so much closer…” before erupting into an instrumental that repeats the riff for four minutes straight because it’s that damn good.
My point is, this is a style of song that’s more pervasive than we probably realize. It’s not just songs that are “long,” it’s songs that are long and winding and intentionally leave this vast wordless space for the listener to project their own feelings, thoughts, and experiences onto.
Sometimes they are conceptual like “Maggot Brain,” where an environmentalist spoken-word intro leads to a soul-rending two-part guitar solo. Sometimes they are skillful shows of musicianship like Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” where rapid bursts of guitar feedback emulate the sounds of guns, helicopters, dropping bombs, and other Vietnam imagery.
Sometimes an artist sneaks it into the album in a way that’s subtle yet impactful, like Angel Olsen’s “Sister” or Soccer Mommy’s “Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes.” Sometimes the artist intentionally draws attention to this style of song by having it open an album as Japanese Breakfast does with “Diving Woman.” Other times, the artist will choose to close the record with this brand of winding instrumental stretch like the aforementioned Weezer, or even something like Jimmy Eat World’s “Goodbye Sky Harbor,” where the song’s lengthy 13-minute coda is either loved or immediately skipped over depending on who’s listening.
Bands like The Antlers seem to craft these kinds of songs effortlessly. Songs like “Rolled Together” and “Endless Ladder” aren’t even that long but still have enough room to properly unfurl. Across the board, the examples are truly countless. There’s “Black Oak” by Slaughter Beach Dog, “Runaway” by Kanye West, “Drown” by Smashing Pumpkins, “Phone Went West” by My Morning Jacket, and hundreds more. These songs are all incredible and often my favorites of their respective bands. I’ve spent the better part of the last two years compiling these types of songs into one long, genre-free playlist on Spotify that I sometimes throw on when I can’t decide what else I want to listen to. This is just a format of song that clicks with my brain, and I really wish there was a term for it.
One of my first instincts is to call these types of songs “jams,” but that evokes so many images of hairy hippies, tye-dye t-shirts, nitrous tanks, and ganja goo balls that the title becomes unappealing. Bands like Phish and even My Morning Jacket indeed go out of their way to transform their songs into “experiences” when played live, but given the types of songs that I’m talking about, the word “jam” feels almost dirty. I like the idea of following the twists and turns of a live performance; that can be an extraordinarily rewarding and powerful experience, I just don’t like what the word “jam” evokes for me (and I assume) most other people.
I wouldn’t call “Transatlanticism” a jam song, but it undeniably bears many of the same qualities. Truth be told, what I’m discussing here is some mix of jam band tendencies, post-rock builds, and stoner rock song structures. I know the concept of “jamming” isn’t relegated to any one genre, band, or scene, but hearing it done well on-record is so rare. I can be listening to a random album like At Home With Owen and suddenly, halfway through, get hit with a seven-minute slow-burn like “A Bird In Hand” and be swept off my feet.
This format is striking because they intentionally stray away from the three-to-five-minute verse/chorus/verse structure that many songs default to. A song like Pedro The Lion’s “Second Best” would never get played on the radio, regardless of what year it came out or how popular the band already was. Similarly, a cut like “13 Months in 6 Minutes” by The Wrens is pretty unlikely to be someone’s favorite track on the album. These songs are simply too long and too unwieldy for standard radio play, streaming binges, or music videos. They don’t lend themselves well to any of those formats because they’re meant to be experienced and taken in with a subconscious part of your mind working to fill in the blanks and flesh out the edges.
That is what’s so great about these songs. They’re hypnotic. They invite you in and give you time to breathe, listen, think, and feel. They’re also ever-changing. Depending on where you’re at in life, you could take something totally different away from the instrumental as another listener. Hell, give it time, and the way you interpret any one of these songs will change based on what phase you’re at in your own life. It’s a Rorschach Test in musical form.
Two of my favorite songs of all-time use this exact same format. First, there’s “Like A River” by Sharks Keep Moving (which I’ve written about in detail before), then there’s “Oh God, Where Are You Now?” by Sufjan Stevens (which I’ve also written about in loving detail over here). Shortly behind those two is “Only In Dreams” by Weezer.
You can see why I was so shocked to find out that “Only In Dreams” is about something as bodily and objectively-hilarious as ejaculation. I mean, the band doesn’t exactly play it for laughs, but I feel like that explanation kinda takes some of the mysticism away. Until you hear that exact commentary from the band, “Only In Dreams” could be literal, it could be metaphorical, it could just be weird poetry, but as soon as you know it’s about Rivers Cuomo pounding off, you’re just like “...oh.”
It’s like if you were in the middle of interpreting a deep meaning from an abstract piece of art from someone like Rothko or Pollock, and then the artist themselves came up behind you mid-thought and whispered, ‘this one’s about the time I shit my pants in a Taco Bell parking lot.’ You have no choice but to have reality come crashing down around you upon hearing that. The illusion is shattered, and all you’re left thinking about is low-grade meat, cold tortillas, and diablo hot sauce. While you were once finding some sense of existential peace in the art, now your mind is consumed by thoughts of your own body and its disgusting functions.
An artist’s intent should not completely override your personal interpretation of the work, but finding out that the song’s creator had such an opposing message in mind is a little conflicting, to say the least.
“Orange, Red, Yellow” by Mark Rothko (1961)
The doubly-funny part of this is that I know this type of song is not for everyone. If you’ve made it this far, I assume you probably enjoy this type of structure or, at the very least, are interested in where this is all going. See, I know these tracks are just tiring and overindulgent to some people, but what some might call long-winded, I call searching. What others see as boring musical repetition, I see as an empty canvas. What others interpret as masturbatory, I interpret as cosmically-affirming.
At times, this format feels like the musical equivalent of a long take in film. André Bazin is a famous French film critic who has focused a great deal of his career writing about the realism of the “long take.” The long take is a filmmaking technique in which an individual shot has a much longer duration than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of movies in general. Bazin argues that directors use this technique out of a “respect for the continuity of dramatic space and its duration.” He argues that long takes are closer to how we as an audience perceive reality (i.e., unfolding in real-time) and, therefore, more impactful. It gives the viewer a personal choice of what to focus on, and it introduces ambiguity into the structure of the film. All of these concepts apply to music as well.
Songs with this structure also have a strong sense of continuity. It feels as if we are being swept into the scenery along with the artist. As the listener, we have the choice to focus on the song as much or as little as we like. We can listen to individual instruments, pick apart the time signature, figure out how this melody flows from the lyrics, or just let our mind wander with the band as our guide. That’s powerful.
Ironically, much like the song format I’m attempting to write about, I don’t have much of a defined ending for this piece. Instead, I’ll opt to do something I never do and close this article out with a quote. I know that’s a bit of a cop-out, but it’s too relevant to this discussion for me not to include. In their recently-unearthed Oregon City Sessions, there’s a section where Portugal. The Man lead singer John Gourley discusses the band’s creative process circa 2008 and how they re-interpret their own creations in a live setting. In it, he simply explains,
“I’ve always really liked that droney… I mean, calling it ‘background music’ is not the best way to talk about it, but I love things like that. I’d love to do a record eventually where we can just go for ten minutes and do what a song needs to do as opposed to culling those points as far as the song structure goes. I think we should be a little bit more loose.”
