Ohrenschmaus

This song totally rules my world right now. I must have listened to it at least twenty times in the past week. It goes well with my current minimalistic obsession which I already tried to express in the haikus about hiking with my father on El Hierro. There is only Chan Marshall’s raspy & at the same time fragile voice and her piano play on her version of this classic, simple song (from George Cukor’s 1957 movie with the same name starring Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani which tells the story of a rancher who marries his Italian sister-in-law after the passing of his wife, but she falls in love with his son). Cat Power drops some lines of the original lyrics and makes them even more concise. She inhales life in this song and makes it totally her own. Forget Johnny Mathis, Nina Simone or David Bowie, instead at getting at the heart of this song they made it an unbearable Schnulze (tearjerker). But Chan Marshall manages to marry the deep sadness inherent in this tune to an irresistible groove when she evokes the „you“ seven times in a row and clicks her fingers. This playfulness, this joy when she just utters „you“ is a miracle. As if she had just discovered that there is a „you“, that she is not alone in the world. I had four live versions and the album version from the Covers Record which is even more stripped down to the bone to choose from but the performance from La Route du Rock 2006 was the one I preferred, one reason being the length, the other the easiness of the cascades of „you’s“. A while ago Jordan from one of my favourite mp3 blogs Said the Gramophone already analysed this song and came to similar conclusions. Concerning the lines about the leaf and the tree I find the lyrics rather revealing as the singer is the tree and the other beloved person the leaf. It is the leaf which will one day be blown away by the wild wind, the tree will stay.

Here are the lyrics she uses:

Love me, love me, say you do
Let me fly away with you
Give me one more caress
Satisfy this hungriness
We are creatures of the wind
Wild is the wind

You, you, you, you, you, you, you
You touch me
When you touch I hear the sound of mandolines
You, you, you, you, you, you, you
You kiss me
With your kiss my life begins

Like a leaf clings to a tree
Please cling to me
We are creatures of the wind
Wild is the wind

This entry was posted on März 2, 2009 at 21:39 and is filed under ENG, musi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.