London-based writer. Often climbing.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • On ‘Cotton Crown’ by Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon sing ‘You got your cotton crown’ multiple times at the end. Gordon accidentally sings it one too many times and trails off, like, ‘You got your cott — uh’.

    In ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, on the second verse Paul McCartney laughs while singing the word ‘writing’, reportedly because John Lennon mooned him from the control booth. Another Beatles one is on ‘What Goes On’ when Ringo Starr sings ‘Tell me why’ and you can hear Lennon shout ‘We already told you why!’, presumably in reference to their earlier song ‘Tell Me Why’, which Starr also sang.

    There’s a really famous one on Nirvana’s cover of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. At the beginning of the guitar solo, Kurt Cobain misses the note then overcorrects and misses it again, but it’s a surprisingly musical-sounding error. I doubt he’d have dubbed it regardless!









  • Divers by Joanna Newsom. I could’ve picked about ten different albums as my all time best, but you said you liked great lyrics and this album has them. The basic question of the album is ‘How is love possible when death is inevitable?’ and Newsom spends forty minutes giving various answers to that question, drawing on Percy Shelley, James Joyce and Albert Einstein, among others.

    If that sounds more like an essay than an album, that’s because you need the music, too, to fully appreciate what Newsom does. The lyrics aren’t arbitrary; they always speak to the lyrics and vice-versa. This includes fairly obvious audio-verbal puns, as when she hits a sustained chord on the piano as she sings the word ‘sustains’, and also more recondite use of motifs and key changes that complement the complex lyrical ideas that she’s exploring. The upshot is that I think you’d know this album was about love and loss even if you didn’t understand a word of the lyrics.