Okkervil River – Unless It’s Kicks (2007)
This song’s a remedy. A cure for all your give up and droop. It’s a tribute to the way that art can save your life, can pull you right up. A messy bo-diddley beat from drums and guitar, and I’ve never been so grateful for an egg-shaker. Do you enjoy rock‘n’roll? Will Sheff’s rock‘n’roll is rich in ragged poetry: “What gives this mess some grace unless it’s kicks, man? / Unless it’s fictions, unless it’s sweat or it’s songs?” That impossible rhyme – “fictions” with “kicks, man” – it makes me happy every time. It reminds me how much I like words, verses, songs, choruses. It distracts me from everything bad and makes me think art is invincible. Just at that moment, Sheff sings a knowing narration: “When[ever] I’ve been fixed I am convinced that I will not get so broke up again.”
Everyone gets broke up inside, now and then. It happened before and it will happen again. In the meantime, fill your record shelves with remedies. You are allowed to stack the scales in your favour.
Scott Merritt – Willing Night (2015)
This song’s a remedy. Full of hope and purpose, bare of schmaltz. Merritt was close to a star in the 1980s, working with Daniel Lanois and Jane Siberry, and to many he’s still one of the country’s most talented songwriters. But he has released just three albums in the past 25 years: the latest, Of, came out in April. Willing Night shows him raging against the darkness, or at least hoping against it, imagining that there’s more to the universe than its slow incremental heat-death. “Junebugs bangin’ into lamps up and down the road,” he sings. “All the dark eyed windows, where we run up the split level rows / and a rail in a trainyard crying somewhere / and a little faith inside.”
Merritt plays a tenor ukulele, but it isn’t the jaunty uke of minivan ads: It’s a tiny machine made of wood and gut, fragile and trying. And the two of them are joined by other voices: blasts of harmonica, Jeff Bird’s benevolent double bass, Andy Magoffin’s patient baritone horn. The finished result is a song that seems sure and pleading at the same time. “What might / what might / what might,” Merritt repeats to close the song. Maybe it’s an exhortation (“What might!”). Maybe it’s a wish (“What might?”). Or if we’re lucky – it’s both.
Nicki Minaj ft. 2 Chainz – Beez In The Trap (2012)
This song’s a remedy. A different kind of remedy – ice-cold, with side effects. Beez In The Trap will give you shakes, fever, mild delirium. Three years old and it still sounds like a song from tomorrow. Rap that’s crude and unassailable, a decree from an omnipotent monarch. But in fact the song is her subjects’. In fact you can sing along. Minaj’s “I” belongs to you, if you need it. Seize the sceptre and rule.
Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.