Sigh No More/Mumford & Sons

Congratulations to Mumford & Sons for their memorable joint performance with Bob Dylan and the Avett Brothers tonight at the 2011 Grammy Awards. We hope it makes up for being passed over in the two categories in which they were nominated (Best New Artist and Best Rock Song).

The London Evening Standard dubbed Mumford & Sons "The Bookshop Band" and wrote that their music, "like the best bookshops, is intimate, old-fashioned and filled with literary references." For our part, we hardly know where to begin with their debut album Sigh No More. Marcus Mumford told the paper that nearly half the songs on the album are inspired by authors.

Leading the pack is Timshel, inspired by John Steinbeck's East of Eden, published in 1952. The novel makes strong allusions to the Book of Genesis, particularly the story of Cain and Abel. A character named Lee, a Chinese-American domestic servant who spent years studying the Cain and Abel episode, translates the Hebrew word timshel as "Thou mayest"--meaning man is free to choose. Timshel becomes a key point of reference in the book. Lee says:

There are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order 'Do thou,' and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in 'Thou shalt.' Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But 'Thou mayest'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win. . . . Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this--this is a ladder to the stars."

The song's lyrics distill this as: And you have your choices/And these are what make man great/His ladder to the stars. The repeated line As brothers we will stand and we'll hold your hand also resonates as the book focuses on two sets of brothers within the Trask family--Charles and Adam, and in the next generation Caleb and Aron--whose lives parallel those of Cain and Abel in significant ways.

Steinbeck's influence can also be felt in the track Dust Bowl Dance, an allusion to the milieu of his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. Marcus Mumford even connects his favorite author's attitude to the experience of touring. "He talked about how a journey is a thing of its own, and you can't plan it or predict it too much because that suffocates the life out of it," he told the London Evening Standard. "That's kind of what touring is like. Even though there's a structure--you know what towns you're going to, and that you'll be playing a gig--pretty much anything can happen."

Other references: The album's title is a quote from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, and the title track, Sigh No More, includes quotes from that play. Roll Away Your Stone paraphrases Macbeth (Shakespeare's For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires/Let not light see my black desires becomes Stars hide your fires/For these here be my desires). "You can rip off Shakespeare all you like; no lawyer's going to call you up on that one," Mumford observes. The Cave includes references to Homer's The Odyssey--as we've seen in previous posts, a favorite literary reference in popular music.

The band's devotion to books extends beyond their music: They took part in a campaign to help save Britain's struggling independent booksellers. And when Marcus Mumford isn't writing songs, performing, touring, or reading, he runs a book club on the band's website.

East of Eden (KindleEdition)
The Grapes of Wrath (Kindle Edition)
Much Ado About Nothing (Kindle Edition)
Macbeth (Kindle Edition)
The Odyssey (Kindle Edition)

Girls in Their Summer Clothes/Bruce Springsteen

There's a lot of conjecture out there that Bruce Springsteen's Girls In Their Summer Clothes, from his 2007 album Magic, was inspired by Irwin Shaw's celebrated 1939 short story The Girls in Their Summer Dresses (found in the collection Short Stories: Five Decades).

We could find no statement from Mr. Springsteen to either confirm or dispel this rumor (even after an exhaustive 6-minute search), but we found an essay by critic Armond White that links the song and the story.

"The notion of the Great American Novel died the moment Hollywood was invented and though the idea was briefly resurrected in the mid-20th century, it died again with the birth of rock and roll," White wrote in the journal First of the Month. He argues that Springsteen's 2002 album The Rising was "an honorable attempt at a kind of novelistic national vision—a high cultural concept translated to a pop medium," but concludes that "Magic perfects the Great American Novel concept into an Album-of-the-Moment urgency." He continues:

Springsteen faces the same fundamental questions as the post-WWII American novelists. His sexual and social response is essential to the rich feeling of a song like "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" which was inspired by Depression-era writer Irwin Shaw's career-defining short story "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses," where an entwined dilemma of marital fidelity and urban stress concentrates attention on a lost faith.

We're not sure we agree with White that the Boss was inspired by Shaw. Springsteen's hopeful song about persevering through hard times to a better future (Things been a little tight/But I know they're gonna turn my way) has little in common thematically with Shaw's story, in which a couple strolling in New York confront deep fault-lines in their marriage as a result of the husband's wandering eye. But when White calls the song "my favorite track on the album," we're in complete agreement.

Shaw's story seems to have inspired some other musicians though:
• Brian Hobbs features an instrumental called Girls in Their Summer Dresses on his 2010 album Second Glances.
• Texas musician David Fahl's song The Girls in Their Summer Dresses appears on his 2008 album Life Is Good. "I wrote this at the request of my wife in honor of the Irwin Shaw short story of the same name," Fahl says.

Also notable is The Girls In Their Summer Dresses by The Airborne Toxic Event, which can be found on the deluxe edition of their eponymous album, released in 2008. The band's Mikel Jollett discussed the song with Radio Free Silver Lake:

"The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" is a story by Irwin Shaw. It's about a man and a woman walking down the street in New York city in the summer. The man keeps staring at these beautiful women as they walk by. The woman, who is his wife, is not happy about this. They fight. He reasons that he's been a good husband, supportive, faithful, etc... but just must stare at these woman. He can't help it. It's a very compelling argument he gives, but she simply can't accept it, won't accept it. The song is basically their argument -- his reasoning and her response to it.

I didn't actually read the story until I saw that Woody Allen movie Celebrity. There's a writer in that movie who says about the story that the title alone is better than most short stories. I thought so too. Such a compelling image the words inspire, kind of a nostalgia for innocence, youth: who are these girls? Why are they wearing dresses? Will I ever know such things again? Have I lost something? Am I dying?

The story's pretty good, too.

You can sample the song here. Jollett himself is at work on a novel and--in a touch that warms our Classics Rock! heart--the band's name comes from a section of Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise.

In Memory of Reynolds Price: Copperline and New Hymn/James Taylor

Celebrated author Reynolds Price died today at the age of 77, as the result of a heart attack he suffered on Sunday. Price was the James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University, where he taught for more than 50 years. He was known as a prolific writer who produced nonfiction, poetry, plays, essays, and fiction, including the novel Kate Vaiden, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. His most recent book was his third memoir, Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back, published in 2009.

Less well known is Price's work as a lyricist: He collaborated on two songs with his friend and fellow North Carolinian James Taylor.

"Price emerged as perhaps the first significant American novelist to compose a successful Top 40 popular song; with his friend, singer/songwriter James Taylor, Price collaborated on the 1991 hit popular song 'Copperline,' as well as on another song, entitled 'Hymn,'" writes James A. Schiff in his 1997 book Understanding Reynolds Price. Schiff elaborates:

The collaboration between Price and Taylor goes back to 1982, when Taylor wrote the score for a PBS television production of Price's play Private Contentment. . . . The first song Price and Taylor wrote together was "Hymn" in 1988. Taylor had wanted to write a song for the retirement of an old friend, Bishop Paul Moore, and Price suggested they write a hymn. He then wrote the lyrics to "Hymn," which can be found in The Use of Fire (1990), and Taylor added the music (it was recorded several years later under the name New Hymn on Taylor's Live). The other song, Copperline which they cowrote in 1991 while Price was staying with Taylor at his Connecticut home, can be found on Taylor's New Moon Shine CD.

Ardent Spirits (Kindle Edition)

El Dorado/George Alexander and The Mellomen

Hiatus over. While we were away we had occasion to reacquaint ourselves with the 1967 John Wayne western El Dorado, directed by Howard Hawks. It's entertaining but no classic (if you've seen the earlier Wayne/Hawks collaboration Rio Bravo, you've seen El Dorado—it's essentially a remake). We enjoyed it, but our attention was particularly drawn to the filmmakers' references to Edgar Allan Poe's 1849 poem Eldorado, which can be found in The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

A character called Mississippi, played by James Caan, quotes the poem throughout the film, but the allusions begin with the opening credit sequence, which features a title song performed by George Alexander and The Mellomen. This amiable cowboy ditty reworks Poe's theme of a lifelong quest to attain an elusive goal, and lifts phrases directly from the poem—In sunshine and shadow and particularly Ride, boldly ride, a line that was seemingly made to be used in an amiable cowboy ditty. The lyrics are by actor John Gabriel, who appears in the film as Pedro, with music by Nelson Riddle. Click here to see El Dorado's opening credit sequence, featuring paintings by Western artist Olaf Wieghorst, who also appears in the film as a gunsmith called the Swede.

For a more faithful musical rendering of the poem, see Donovan's 1996 album Sutras, which includes a track called Eldorado that puts Poe's own words to music. Poe scholar Burton R. Pollin, writing in the journal Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, called the track "outstanding" and said it is "composed and sung well by Donovan." See Donovan performing the song here.


The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (Kindle Edition)

Stuck Between Stations/The Hold Steady - Part II

In our previous post we examined the reference to Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road in The Hold Steady song Stuck Between Stations, found on their 2006 album Boys and Girls in America.  But there's another literary reference in the song that focuses on Minneapolis poet John Berryman.

Berryman's 1964 volume 77 Dream Songs won the Pulitzer Prize (it was later combined with a second collection, His Toy, His Story, His Rest and published in one volume called The Dream Songs).  His later works were less well received, however, and he suffered from depression and alcoholism. (He was drunk and exhausted, but he was critically acclaimed and respected, according to the lyrics.)  In 1972, he committed suicide by jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.  The song alludes to this event:

The devil and John Berryman
Took a walk together
They ended up on Washington
Talking to the river...

And a few lines later:

That was the night that we thought John Berryman could fly.
But he didn't
So he died.

Berryman's own father, a banker, had killed himself when the poet was twelve years old.