Hip Songs You Are Currently Obsessed With - Printable Version
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Re: Hip Songs You Are Currently Obsessed With - Tthip - 08-05-2016
The Depression Suite
Re: Hip Songs You Are Currently Obsessed With - spottrax - 08-05-2016
Machine.... after hearing the live version (which is great), a new appreciation for the studio version. I think the band (or Universal Canada) should release this to radio stations as a single. Solid song all the way around. Terrific lyrics, and meaty chord changes in the chorus make this one a repeater...when I'm at the gym on the treadmill!!
Re: Hip Songs You Are Currently Obsessed With - spottrax - 08-05-2016
Killer Whale Tank Wrote:"Tired as f**k."
What poetic imagination this song shows in building off its blunt refrain. 'The greedy palace,' that carefully managed balloon, the 'lake of gin,' the 'sweet sea,' and the great line, 'it's so easy when you don't know what you're doing.' The song has a quality that few songs do - and the Hip are especially good at this - of stirring me without my understanding exactly why. ('We Want to be It' and 'Yer Everywhere' are two other examples of this effect, making you almost want to cry for reasons unclear). It does this at a very specific moment, i.e., 'being aloft, wherever the wind may blow...' Just something in the way the chord change and the vocals and lyrics all coalesce there.
Thematically, the song is cousin to 'The Kids Don't Get It' - oddly enough, another out-of-left-field favourite of mine - in that it's basically about how hard it is to keep sustaining something over a long span of time. I'm pretty sure Gord has his career and his art in mind here. 'Greedy Palace' maybe suggests the whole apparatus of the music industry. Be that as it may, as in 'Kids,' the song suggests it was vastly easier in the early days ('May and June' - springtime, in other words), when you don't know what you're doing and you don't know how easy it's all coming. Bob Dylan has said something similar in an interview, claiming that he had to learn to do 'consciously' what had come unconsciously to him in his mid-60s heyday.
It all reminds me of a comment made by one of my professors - an older, distinguished fellow - when I remarked on what a satisfying career his must be. He said, 'well...it gets hard. It gets hard.' Clearly he meant, 'over time.' And that's what Gord is saying here, I take it.
The musical setting is one of the best on the record, IMHO (I love Fay's drum-rolls at the end), and the production terrific, combining a sense of wooziness with warmth.
It's not an epic masterpiece like 'Nautical Disaster.' But it''s a case of the band getting *everything* there was to get out of the song.
Great review of Tired as ***k! I like this one too. Ala... a lot of Hip songs, I wasn't fired up about it on the first listen. The music is cool but I wasn't on board with Downie's lyrics yet. "Greedy Palace" could mean many things...music industry, fans, media, even his own family wanting more than he could give. Love that line too. The line "Tired as ***k" also has several interpretations.
MMP is a very complex album both lyrically and sonically. Makes me wonder if there were hints of what was to come...