The Earwyrms Canon, Pt. II: Voice
ISSUE #179
I’m ending the year by tackling the impossible: the 100 best songs ever recorded. Not ranked from #100 to #1, but instead given their own meaningful sequence, a personal structure to reveal itself over the next six weeks. It will be a compass for navigating my sonic perspective. An Official Earwyrms Canon.
This issue of the Canon is about Voice—the first ten were an introduction to the list, but these ten are grouped by one of humanity’s great gifts, an instrument whose versatility often feels unnoticed. It gives us language, our greatest tool, and conveys worlds of meaning through meta-text—inflection, intonation, vibrato, attitude. These are my favorite vocal performances.
“Glory Box” | Portishead
1994
Has a song ever sounded so much like flickering flames? The strings—taken from Isaac Hayes’s “Ike’s Rap II,” already a burning portrait of contrition—squeal like they’ve been stoked with wet pine. The guitar sizzles like burning nitrate. But it’s Beth Gibbons’s voice that puts this song over the edge, sliding between seduction and sensitivity, a performance rivaling the best femme fatales in film.
“Is That All There Is?” | Peggy Lee
1969
Everything ends, and there always follows a moment of desolation. I just have to keep going now? That’s it? This song builds a perfect showtime number—arranged by Randy Newman, who also played piano and conducted the orchestra—out of that feeling, like walking out after a movie and having to figure out what to do next. It was written by Jerry Lieber and Michael Stoller, famous for many Elvis hits like “Hound Dog,” “Love Me,” and “Jailhouse Rock,” but it was Peggy Lee’s version, with her laconic delivery, that seals its place at the top. She played it despondent, but still relaxed, comforting in how cool she remains in the face of endless disappointment—until that perfect, cheeky little ending.
“Vitamin C” | CAN
1972
I fixate a lot on hooks, but some of my favorite songs lock into rhythms that fill my head with jigsaw pieces. Here, Damo Suzuki starts with a whisper, spilling secrets before bursting with inscrutable fervor. I lean in just in time to crack my ear drum. This was West Germany in the 1970s—revolutionary contexts often drive experimentation as the mind begs new structures of thought—and there’s something so subversive about CAN’s noise, a darkened alley in a hazy dream where any impossible thing can occur.
“The Great Gig in the Sky” | Pink Floyd
1973
The younger we get to a work of art, the stronger the shield of memory that surrounds it. This is the problem with “best songs”—how does the personal become universal? If I had to bet on a Rosetta Stone, it’d be “The Great Gig in the Sky,” with its wordless, eternal performance by Clare Torry. Over a piano progression that feels like murk, she wasn’t afraid to wail like a newborn in the face of our one true common denominator—death.
“Ocean Man” | Ween
1997
Before Old Greg or sea shanties or even Spongebob Squarepants, there existed “Ocean Man,” a pitch-perfect, myth-making parody about how fucking weird it would be to see a walking fish. A joke? In a way. But listen to how that guitar rips—of course a gilled guy would sound that sick.
“Teenage Kicks” | The Undertones
1978
Northern Irish legends right out of Derry, The Undertones wrote a self-sustaining nugget of power pop with one of the best opening drum fills of all time. Is it a sock-hop cover? Prescient hyper-punk? It’s somehow everything at once. BBC DJ John Peel famously loved this song so much that he once played it twice in a row before asking that its opening line be carved onto his gravestone. In his words, “It doesn’t get much better than that.”
“Angeles” | Elliott Smith
1997
Music and poetry were the same before they split, but some are still written as one—perfect little mysteries, notes held up by magnets on the fridge. “Angeles” is one, and Elliott Smith built worlds from only a guitar—and those are some complicated chords—and the silver cobwebs of his voice. His was one of my favorites, like the cooling skin after a shower or a light just soft enough to see—centers of all earthly knowledge.
“I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” | Whitney Houston
1987
Whitney gave us one of those songs that will never been touched by burnout, even after years of playing at every wedding. She also gives one of many perfect performances, effortless and ebullient like when she sang the National Anthem. Remember the first time you heard her jump up a key at the end? One of the best in pop history. By the time she’s firing off “Don’t you wanna dance?” the song is playing me like a drum and sorry but I’m screaming.
“Archangel” | Burial
2007
Like “Windowlicker,” this is another marvel, written using Sound Forge back in the DAW Dark Ages. That program forces users to blind-mix, cutting without visible waveforms, so Burial was matching up these pieces of Ray J’s “One Wish” in the dark. I find new things to listen for every time, reminding me of all my friends’ old basements stacked with their neon towers or dreaming of some future as I walk home in the snow.
“Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” | Broken Social Scene
2002
There’s nothing lonelier than being seventeen. You wait for something—anything!—big to happen, for your life to finally start, but instead you wind up repeating yourself, repeating the same day every day, the same old lonesome day forever. Set aside that the lyrics are now a micro-meme—the vocal effect itself is astounding, layering and layering its robotic routine, becoming more and more desperate until it’s finally frayed, begging to break out and fading away.
Next week—more to come.
Technically, halfway through the year is next Monday, July 1st. This is a leap year, after all. They’re the only years where there’s an even split in days; the only times the divide falls at midnight, not noon.