Anatomy of An Obsession

I’m in love.

Chris had posted a comment on one of my Jandek posts about why we obsess about what we do when we do. While my love for this song doesn’t constitute a full-blown artist obsession just yet, I think it provides a bit of insight nonetheless.

On Saturday night I was closing up shop for the night, when I noticed an mp3 on my desktop I had downloaded about a week ago. The track, “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” is off of Zooey Deschanel’s and M. Ward’s upcoming collaborative effort “Volume One,” to be released under the moniker She and Him on Merge records this March. Chris had alerted me to the collaboration via Hype Machine (so there you go for its usefulness), and I got this album track off of ViaChicago. I finally listened to it, and from the first piano chord to the time I went to bed I had played it successively seventeen times.

My first listen though the song, the lyrics became apparent right away. After “why do you let me stay here/ all by myself?” it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know where the lyrics are going. BUT – then the line “it’s not a secret/ why do you keep it?” coupled with the introduction of playful backing vocals just mad my heart flutter. The piano descant that starts at 0:33 followed by the full kit, and then the perfectly placed guitar solo, sealed the deal.

So what is it about this song that pulled me in? This song shares several qualities with my most played iTunes track (Sleater-Kinney’s “Rollercoaster” which, at 81 plays has over 30 plays on the second most-played track) – for one, you immediately get the sense that Zooey enjoys singing this song. The sigh at 0:06, the “uh-huh” at 1:31 and “just give me credit” at 1:36 come from a singer whose smiling, providing the song with a humanizing, energizing sex appeal – reinforced by the oh-so-human missed notes at 1:53 and 2:01. This isn’t a technically perfectly track, it’s an emotionally perfect track.

Similarly, “Rollercoatser” begins when Janet drops one of her sticks, and the track ends with one of the ladies laughing. The tracks also share a quality that lures me in every time, “oooohs” and “do-do’s.” “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” also employs hand claps, another aesthetic weakness of mine. Like the piano descant in “Stay Here,” “Rollercoaster” has an ascending riff on the chorus (first at 0:46) that drew me in the first time. The energizing sex appeal of Zooey’s “uh-huh” is matched by Carrie’s brilliant breakdown, “I’ll be your monkey, your puppy, I’ll be your superfreak/ I fell the first day it took you a whole week.”

The coy lust of each song’s opening gives way to seamless breakdowns (contradiction?) and, ultimately, more enlightened closures.

“Rollercoaster” conveys the arc (rollercoaster, if you will) of a relationship, the emotions one is left with when the initial spark wears off. Opening with a brilliantly cliché trip to the market for a “red cherry tomato,” (tempting her sorely – she’d like to bite one!) the singer then offers to make her lover dinner. Trouble appears in Eden when “appetite isn’t what we predicted/ would you wanna heat it up later?” Well, would you? The song ends with an acknowledgement of reality: “I know that some of our days are bitter/ but stay with me honey, things will get better” and returns to the first chorus, ending the song with the promise, “I’ll go at full boil til you s-s-s-s-stop me later.”

The period of enlightenment, as it were, in “Stay Here” is subtler – more evident in Zooey’s inflection as it is the actual lyrics. The whole song is rather light, but a funny thing happens after the guitar solo/key change. While the first half of the song contains musing and begging, the key change gives way to requests phrased as questions followed by the sly, “just give me credit.” “I’m just sitting on the shelf” goes from a lament to a “who, me?”

In the end, the most brilliant thing about these songs is that they are pop, plain and simple. Clever, yes, but not terribly deep. Pleasing to the ears, but not technically difficult to appreciate. Both of these songs have the ability to inspire longing without hangover, and as everyone knows, a high without the consequence is a sure road to addiction.