Song in My Head - State of Mind
I was recently asked to write a piece for State of Mind music magazine’s monthly column entitled “Song in My Head”. This section comes to readers by various songwriters musing on one of their favorite songs. I was immediately drawn to “America” by Paul Simon but realized that past month’s writers also loved Paul Simon songs. Here’s what I ended up with… (slated for print for the June 2009 issue)
Greg Brown’s voice breaks my heart right in half and soothes me as I look for the glue to paste it back together again. His lyrics send me spinning through memories of love lost and time spent traveling and searching for god knows what. He often sings of simple things…watermelons, preserves, cars, and my homeland, the Midwest…romanticizing daily life with a sense of gratitude and grace. Brown sings fearlessly about women with both gentle love, like that of a Paul Simon song, and gritty lust, think Tom Waits. He doesn’t paint himself to be a good man but I still want to believe that he is decent and simply battered down by loving too much and walking through life with deep desire.
There are so many Greg Brown songs to choose from as he edges on having 30 records to his name. “China” was my introduction to his music at summer camp in 1997, found on a mix tape littered with Ani DiFranco and Dar Williams’ songs. “Hey Baby Hey” has extreme sentimental value to me and I’ve been known to cover that as well as “Lord I Have Made You a Place in My Heart”. I always come back to the lesser known, “Brand New ’64 Dodge” one of his most simple songs which is found on his 1994 release The Poet Game.
“Brand New ’64 Dodge” is a snapshot of a small moment in a boy’s life when everything was so damn simple yet so close to being complicated by his imminent adulthood. Lyrically Brown touches every sense…the visual of the quintessential sixties family in the car together, the new car smell and the smell of autumn leaves, the sounds of the asphalt and the gravel crunch and kids playing football. Brown also lets you in on small and intimate details of each of these character’s lives without bogging the listener down with emotion and without even getting close to telling you how you should or could feel about this family. This boy has a girlfriend, the girlfriend has a retarded brother, his sister gets car sick on occasion, and his father is a stoic man. Greg Brown so cleverly signs… and dad looks like he might smile.
The melody is true to the lyrics and stays so simple, never reaching any epic moment of raw emotion. More melody can be found in Bo Ramsey’s four note guitar riff that is so tastefully placed at the end of each verse, acting as a refrain. There is no chorus, no real story line, and the rhyme scheme is straight forward. The power of this song lies in its abundance of simplicity.
When I fall in love with a song I fall hard and with grand loyalty. I know that I am in love with a song when it makes me pay attention to the way I breathe and forces me to play it over and over again. The sense of nostalgia that “Brand New ’64 Dodge” gives me makes me breathe more easily and I typically smile, just a little bit, upon each listen.