Great call. This is my favorite Steely Dan song and you’ve nicely detailed four of its many absolutely perfect moments.
mmm
Beatles. The first 18 seconds of If I Fell.
For me it’s the most musically interesting and beautiful moment they ever recorded.
It always grabs me when I hear Belinda Carlisle sing, “Can you see them?” in Our Lips Are Sealed. I’m not really taking it in the context of the lyrics, since until I found the live version for this thread, most of the lyrics in this song were gibberish to me. I don’t know… it is just such a provocative thing to yell into a microphone, and set against the saccharine melodies of the song it hits me as if it is terribly deep. “Can you hear them?” doesn’t have the same effect. Also, the drum transition (about 1:50 in this version) after the bridge strikes me as just a perfect rock transition every time I hear it, though it doesn’t quite come out as well here as in the studio version. Anyway, one of my dirty little secrets is that I like a lot of Go Go’s songs.
Iggy Pop’s take on Les Feuilles Mortes has a little drum roll around 1:32 that seems to push the song through a magic window- I just love that one little part so much- it is perfect! I really like the bass and the horn in this piece as well. Really, the whole thing is great.
Then there is the climax in Wagner’s Prelude to Act I after about 6:25. You really have to listen to the whole thing to appreciate it, since for the first part of the piece the brass seems kind of timid, or at least follows the lead of the rest of the orchestra. Finally it seems to realize what it really is, and just subordinates the rest of the instruments to it. The stings play little rapid square patterns underneath, like angels flapping their wings or swirls of smoke from suddenly rising to a very great height. It is an exhilarating rush of power, but also suggests that something is perhaps turning into a dangerous monster, as this section disrupts the sweetness and beauty of the previous sections to replace it with its own bombast, though those sections always seemed a little sad, as if they could see it coming and were always saying “goodbye”. It makes me cry. This is one of those magic pieces that just ‘talks’- it seems so meaningful!