Music
You Need to Hear This Song #3
Heavy Rotation: Chinatown, Bleachers w/ Bruce Springsteen (Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night, 2020)
Heavy Rotation was a music industry term for songs that one way or another got a lot of airplay. It referred to the large amount of rotation that a particular record got on turntables at radio stations. Since, until the 1980s, this was the only way to get new music into the ears and brains of listeners, heavy rotation meant increased sales. Increased sales were good for the record company and artist alike.
These days, some of us still put records on at home and give them a spin. Most of us don’t. However, the term still applies, though in a different way. Streaming services like Spotify sell subscriptions to listeners and then pay artists based on listens. At least, that’s the way I think it works.
For me, heavy rotation means a song that is in my head for some reason. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a day, maybe for longer. It’s a song that you come back to from time to time and still feels just as good. This series of articles is dedicated to these songs.
In this series, I am going to highlight a particular song by a particular band or singer. I think it’s important to know a bit about the band, to know a bit about where the song fits into its history and where the song fits into what was happening in music at that time. Then there’s the song itself. Who’s playing on it, what are the lyrics getting at and why is it so good? How does it still occupy sonic space in my life?
I’ll (try to) keep it short. It shouldn’t take you any longer to read than the song itself. To that end, I’ll put a Youtube clip of the original recording at the top of the article so you can listen as you read. Or not. And because a song is often much different live than in the recording studio, I’ll stick a live clip on at the end.
What song is in your head right now? Here’s one that won’t leave mine today:
#3 — Chinatown, Bleachers with Bruce Springsteen (Take the Sadness out of Saturday Night / 2020)
Wait. Before you read the rest of this article…close your eyes and listen to this song.
I had never heard of Bleachers, but I sure had heard of Bruce Springsteen and that’s what led me here, possibly during the first Covid lockdown, way back when.
Alright, so this song comes from Bleachers’ third album called Take the Sadness out of Saturday Night from 2021. Bleachers, as an entity (I don’t know if you’d call it a band) is the work of Jack Antonoff who was / is also in the band, Fun. (We are Young).
The truth is, and I already said so in a previous article, that new music doesn’t really get to me anymore, the way it once did. I don’t know where this song will fit into the grand music pantheon, nor do I know where it will fit into mine, but it’s as good a reason as any that I can think of to keep listening to new music. As soon as I heard it, I couldn’t put it down and I knew it was one for the times. Or my times, anyways.
The song proper begins at 00:34 on the video, with a quietly brushed drum beat. At 00:46 the theme washes over us in a synthesized version of the best of the E Street Band, complete with xylophone. At 1:06, Antonoff’s dark melody shuffles in and by the time he hits the first chorus, you can hear the New Jersey oozing out of him. “But a girl like you / Could rip me out of my head / Black tears on your cheek / I want them in my bed”. We get a hint of Springsteen at the end of this chorus and a bit more in the next one, at 2:42, when he makes his first appearance in the video on the back of a convertible Cadillac, obviously.
It’s here that he takes over, almost completely. Jack has poured his heart out, and it’s almost as though the Boss says, “thanks, kid, I’ve got it from here”. “I want to run”, he pleads, as though he was born for it or something. A beautiful fade into the near distance from there.
What. a. Song. To me, it captures part of the mood of the pandemic, of quarantines, of the heaviness of life, of a moment of calm and clarity of living in your head, despite or because of the madness of the world outside.
Is it melancholy? Is it nostalgia? Is it immense joy? It is crying while laughing through your tears? It is all of these and it’s also that there is still hope for us. “I want to find tomorrow, I want to find tomorrow, with you”, says so.
Now, watch the live video, recorded on the roof of Electric Ladyland Studios in Greenwich NYC in 2020. Late December afternoon, fading light, the band playing to no one. Springsteen is there, stoic, grey and true, ready as ever to make it mean something. Watch the look on the keyboard player’s face at 1:12. Just joy. That same thing on Antonoff’s face at 2:42. And at no point does the Boss look like he’s kidding around. The rest of the band just can’t believe this is happening.
Previously, in this series:
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