THE TERRA FIRMA PLAYLIST: PART TWO
Building a life from scratch. Elizabeth, trapped in a glass pane for thousands of years, is liberated by love. What is the soundtrack that will free her?
1. "Can one kiss, do all of this...?" The Gershwins live in that world where love literally spills over and takes command. Perhaps you might not even get the full import of their music until you hear the fabulous Ella Fitzgerald Sings The George and Ira Gershwin Songbook or until you see Audrey Hepburn caress the song to perfection in Funny Face but once you do, once you get a chance to hear "How Long As This Been Going On?" You will see the restorative power of love and get a glimpse of Gwen Harwood's sublime observation that
"Words cannot express as music does, that unsayable grace which cannot be defined. It leaps like light from mind to mind."
But when words are so melded to the music that both words and music are uplifted and set on high twinned like a compass (the imagery, of course, is Donne's), it is impossible to separate one from the other.
2. "Tell me, this is a dream somebody please..." Is William Hart the most underrated poet of love in modern pop? Listen to any Delfonics compilation and prepare to me plunged into the sticky, impossibility of extricating oneself from the implications of love as it works on those areas that can be reached only by a kind of emotional conjuring. So here we have a glass pane ending up singing a duet with the man who is loving her toward an existence as a woman.
3. "Take a good look at my face, you'll see my smile looks out of place..." Bob Dylan was a huge fan of Smokey Robinson's lyrical skills. And to my mind no one speaks about romantic loss with such ardor. There is a moment where the glass plane Elizabeth has to be pleaded with to come back into the fray and who better to make the case but Smokey Robinson?
4. "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me..." This attempt to speak to the glass pane is dropped early on as Baffkins recognizes that the song, glorious as it may be, veers to far off the mission of reaching the alien glass pane that holds the keys to saving Earth. On a side note when going to a crisis in my life ages ago two albums got me through that dark time: The Smiths' Strangeways, Here We Come and Depeche Mode's Violator. I'm sure a lot of you have that experience where an album, where a piece of music, like that DJ saved your life!
5. Ain't Now Way for Me to Love You, If You Won't Let Me..." The ultimate last gasp. But it takes two! I may be in the minority here but this, in many ways, is Aretha's greatest song (among many masterpieces). If this doesn't get home, nothing will!
Next: The Songs that finally shatter the glass pane prison!
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