Great Moments in Songs

Relatively new Cleveland-based blog Good Hodgkins asked music bloggers to list their favorite "visceral moment" from a song. For example, one person lists a moment from "Westfall" by Okkervil River and writes: "But oh, that moment that Sheff pronounces 'Evil don’t look like anything' with a punch at the end of a hushed verse and the rest of the band takes up the call. It literally made my hair stand on end the first time I heard it."

You get the point.

I imagine this type of list will satisfy Laura Miller, my younger sister, and others who think that listing things depreciates them, because this seems to be about delving further into something rather than standing back so far that judgment becomes flip or meaningless.

So, here are a few moments for me (picked pretty randomly out of what could be thousands, I think). Feel free to leave your own in the comments.

"Not Forgotten You" by Kelly Willis -- When Willis sings, "And I said 'Hail the western bound/with its black tail flying/lay on the rails and leave me to dream/of when your love was mine." The way she stutters the "i" in mine and then the organ comes in right after.

"My Life" by Iris Dement -- Pretty much the whole song, but the way she sings the chorus -- "but I gave joy to my mother/and I made my lover smile/and I can give comfort to my friends when they're hurting/and I can make it seem better for a while" -- kills me every time.

"Funny" by Trash Can Sinatras -- The way he freaks out singing the last verse. I found a guess at a translation online, but I'm only convinced about some of this -- "and when the cap fits I'll wear it/and if I knew what made carpets fly/wouldn't be sitting here twiddling my thumbs in a bar/I'd threadbare my soul and wheedle my way into other people's lives/and out of my own." ("Threadbare" doesn't make sense as a verb, I know, but there is a lot of silly wordplay on the rest of the album, so who knows.)

"Smile" by Pearl Jam -- Both times the music shifts and Vedder soars in with "I miss you already(-eady-ay-ay)."

"Settled Down" by Richard Buckner -- A great song, the best of several good ones added on to a reissue of his first album. Visceral moment is when he goes up high, cracking a bit to sing the "now" in "I'm younger now/history, my dear friend/years away, you say my name/I'm settled down, but I won't give up again." Really, really pretty.

Then there are impressively sustained visceral performances, like most of Patty Griffin's vocals on the album Living With Ghosts or Ray LaMontagne's through most of Trouble or the entirety of Radiohead's performance on The Bends.