first round

(1) Dexys Midnight Runners, “come on eileen”
blew out
(16) Emmylou Harris, “mister sandman”
440-119
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/2/23.

em pasek on “come on eileen”

“Come On Eileen” is a masterclass in unabashed corniness. There is simply nothing that can possibly be taken seriously about a grown man adopting a falsetto and the perspective of a teenager who is soulfully attempting to seduce his girlfriend by talking about how depressing their hometown is, all while his friends chime in with little nonsensical asides like "too-ra-loo-ra too-ra-loo-rye-ay" and some peppy strings play a jaunty little countermelody in the background. Any attempt to defend the song’s merit by defending its musical credibility only makes it sound more ridiculous. (Oh, it merges the sounds of Celtic strings and a Motown-esque beat? Still silly. It samples an Irish folk song about still liking your partner when you both get old and they aren’t hot anymore and concludes with an a cappella verse from the same? Even sillier.) And the song's pop culture legacy doesn't do it any favors in the non-goofy legitimacy department, either. (Most of the folks to whom I've chatted about this song associate it with Dean of Greendale Community College making up silly little lyrics to its tune in Community.) Ultimately, though, “Come On Eileen” doesn’t need to be serious: its beauty lies in how uninhibited it is. It’s a song meant to be howled in karaoke bars and played over and over again on long drives, _________.
Behind its lovely absurdity, though, there’s a hint of darkness in “Come On Eileen” that suggests that something not-so-fun was going down when the song was written. It’s there when frontman Kevin Rowland takes a second away from crooning about being horny to allude to the “beaten down, eyes sunk in smoke-dried face” of the people around him. It’s in the odd attribution of the single to “Dexys Midnight Runners and the Emerald Express”, suggesting some kind of division among the people who recorded it.
The idea that something charming and unserious can result from a period of struggle is nothing new. After all, we live in a world where goofiness levels reaching a fever pitch in the misery pit of the past few years necessitated the popularization of the phrase "goblin mode" just to accurately describe what everyone's whole deal was last year.

THESE PEOPLE ‘ROUND HERE

The deep-seated conflict at the core of Dexys' story goes way beyond anything that a reasonable onlooker might expect from an ensemble with only five albums to its name. They've spent their forty-some years of on-again, off-again banddom breaking up; making up; and near-constantly onboarding, losing, and occasionally regaining members: as of this writing fifty-one individuals have, at some point, been counted as members of the band. Those hardy souls who persisted through multiple album cycles were treated to whiplash-inducing stylistic and lifestyle changes, record label disputes, and endless infighting for their trouble. At the heart of this constant churn is the band's founder and only consistent member, Kevin Rowland, a man who is extremely serious about being serious about music and who, for much of the band’s history, held that virtue above all else.
On the spectrum of all-consuming experiences that it is possible for a person to endure, being a member of Dexys in its heyday sounds like it might have fallen somewhere between "being a member of an extremely weird military unit" and "joining a fairly ill-managed cult that never got completely out of hand because you could walk out before things got completely out of hand". You had to wear a uniform, which changed dramatically to suit Rowland's idea of what a serious band should look like every couple of years. You were expected to participate in a mandatory athletic training regimen alongside your bandmates. If you, like most of the band’s members, were English, you might be assigned a more Irish-sounding name to suit the group’s Celtic image. (Rowland himself was born in Ireland and has resided in England for most of his life.) If you were recruited to the band as a horn player, you might, seemingly on a whim, be instructed by Rowland to take up strings. And your time in the band would most likely be marked by periods of intense secrecy – from your label, from the press, and maybe even from your fans.
Too-Rye-Aye, the dreadfully-named album on which “Come On Eileen” appears, was recorded in a period of particular turmoil for Dexys. It doesn’t sound like anyone was particularly happy with what went down: half the band had one foot out the door after reluctantly agreeing to stick around for the recording, Rowland apparently hated the way the album was produced, and by all accounts the process of trying to promote the single was exhausting.

As of this writing I am two and a half years into a PhD program and still relatively fresh off of a stint in corporate America, which means that like most members of Dexys in the 1980s, I know a thing or two about trying to make something worthwhile in an environment where nobody around you knows what they’re doing and you’re constantly subject to vague instructions and mercurial demands from higher-ups who seem to have no concept of what they’re asking of you.
I don’t find Rowland entirely unsympathetic—after all, whom among us has been spared the agony of being stuck working on a project with a bunch of people we feel aren’t taking things seriously enough – but it’s easy to see why Dexys was, under his leadership, ill-suited for long-term success.

THINGS ‘ROUND HERE HAVE CHANGED

Making sense of the particular magic of “Come On Eileen” is made more complicated by the fact that Rowland has refuted, contradicted, and reevaluated almost every single aspect of the origin story behind his band's best-known song so many times that it's almost impossible to sum it up without sounding like a wide-eyed madman standing in front of a corkboard covered in red string. The first incarnation of his story was pretty normal: Rowland's first love was a girl whom he had called a friend for his whole childhood. When he was thirteen, their relationship became romantic. Rowland was an altar boy, and although the conflict between his Catholic upbringing and his newfound feelings was scary, but it was also intoxicating. Though the relationship didn't last, the memory of those emotions stayed with him. This is a nice story: sweet and simple and just relatable enough to keep it from being too embarrassing, just like the song that it inspired. It isn't true, though. Rowland didn't write the song with a childhood girlfriend in mind. Instead, the song's iconic chorus once bore the confusing and self-congratulatory lyrics "James, Stan, and me," referring to James Brown, Van Morrison, and Rowland himself and their shared musical legacy in the genre of soul. (The substitution of "Stan" for "Van" is apparently part of some convoluted inside joke that Rowland had at some point in his youth and that he legitimately believed would make sense to a broader audience.) Rowland has, at various points, stated that he changed the lyrics to make a point about Catholic repression, or just because he got angry in a session with his label.
Years after the dissolution of Dexys Midnight Runners and deep in the doldrums of a poorly-received solo career, Rowland made a confession that might have shocked the world had the world not largely moved on from him and his musical endeavors: he had stolen “Come On Eileen”.
Here's what happened, according to Rowland: at some point in the leadup to the recording of the second Dexys album, Rowland's ex-bandmate, Kevin Archer, who was a founding member of Dexys but who had already left the band, recorded a demo tape which featured a particular mix of Celtic strings and a "bum-da-dum" bass line that sounded like something off of a Motown record or maybe a Tom Jones single. Rowland listened to that demo tape, and he knew from the moment that he heard it that he needed it to be his. He recorded Archer’s song as his own, making up a story about falling in love as a teenager to sell it as an original project. The song was a sensation, but it was also the band's downfall. Rowland's friendship with Archer deteriorated over the theft, his band fell apart, and neither he nor any of the musicians with whom he had once been associated managed to achieve the “Come On Eileen” career high ever again. Years later, apparently still wracked with guilt, Rowland confessed to stealing the song publicly.
In more recent years, Rowland has recanted this confession. Today, he says that, suffering from depression and impostor syndrome after his most recent failure as a solo artist, he overattributed the song to Archer when, in reality, he had merely taken inspiration from the combination of beats and string sounds that his now-former friend had used.

What is “Come On Eileen” actually about?
The thing that really stands out about Come On Eileen is that Kevin Rowland really loves music and really loves talking about where he got his ideas. The song wears its influences, from  – and yes, even his ridiculous “James, Stan, and me” lyric and the  – all speak to

NOW YOU’RE FULL GROWN

“Come On Eileen” isn’t a good song. It’s a perfect song, the kind that you can come back to forever.
Dexys is still kicking, somehow. Some of the band’s former members have come back, and the group’s lineup has been somewhat consistent for the first time since it formed. They’ve got a new album coming out this year, and while their modern-day output isn’t likely to achieve what ““Come On Eileen”” did, it’s been well-received by critics and fans and everyone involved with creating it seems a hell of a lot happier than they did in the 1940s. And Rowland mentioned in an interview a while back that he and Archer spoke during lockdown and came to the conclusion, once and for all, that Rowland is not a song-stealer, so that’s nice to have settled.
In 2022, Dexys released Too-Rye-Aye (As It Should Have Sounded), a 40th anniversary reissue album which consists of the original Too-Rye-Aye recordings and all-new production to achieve a sound closer to Rowland’s original vision for the record. Some of the songs sound quite different, but “Come On Eileen” is almost untouched. It was perfect all along.

Em Pasek is a geoscientist and PhD student from Michigan currently residing in the central Sierra Nevada. 

Steve johnson on “mister sandman”

Making the case for “Mister Sandman” amid all the great Emmylou Harris songs is like trying to argue for “Slapstick” as a Kurt Vonnegut novel, for the 1982 Cimarron as a Cadillac, for serve them boiled as a thing to do with potatoes. 
Harris’s “Mister Sandman” is more like the sweet potatoes at a bad Thanksgiving dinner. It at first looks like a rich, classic dish that you can handle a modest spoonful of. But below the layer of marshmallows, you discover it’s also got maple syrup mixed in, and then, dental work be damned, there’s a layer of brown sugar at the bottom of the pan, too.
It’s treacle, is the point I’m trying to make: catchy, yes, but catchy in an ooey-gooey, almost sicky-sweet way. Hear it and you can’t help but hum along, even smile in a slightly crazed way. Try to be surprised by it and you will be deeply disappointed. Listen to it too much—which is to say, anywhere from 100 to 2 times—and you may start to think of it as an instrument of torture, insinuating its simple, repeating melody into whichever chunk of the brain gets stuck trying to cope with such things.
The fault, I think, lies not with Harris but with the song itself. The most successful tune by mid-century songwriter Pat Ballard tries to be an earworm and succeeds. It was an earworm in 1954, when Ballard published it and a barbershop-influenced female group from Sheboygan, Wis., called the Chordettes took it to No. 1. It was so much of an earworm that, during that same year, a male group called the Four Aces got it into the top ten.
It was the Four Aces’ version, by the way, that Back to the Future chose as its audio marker of olden times. Their “Mister Sandman” is playing over loudspeakers as Marty McFly walks through the Hill Valley town square and realizes he has slipped into an earlier era. The newspaper he plucks from the trash tells him it is 1955 for certain, but the temporal dislocation was already made clear by “Mister Sandman,” a tune that employs tight vocal harmonies to implore a mythical sleep fairy to magically deliver a dreamboat lover with “wavy hair like Liberace.” Oh, if only. 
“Mister Sandman” was an earworm still in the late 1970s when Harris got together with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt to make a record together. Ronstadt was already a crossover California folk-rock-pop superstar wondering for the masses, “When Will I Be Loved.” Parton came through the mainstream Nashville system, but she won some independence within it by writing visionary songs and sloughing off an old-school male partner. Harris arrived, more or less, from the West, building on the scruffy remnants of her musical partnership with doomed country-music and troublesome-substance evangelist Gram Parsons. Like Ronstadt, but with a much more modest dose of fame, she’d already made several albums that helped set the tone for what would become the Americana/alt-country genre.
Harris had also already established herself as an artist of exceptional taste. She hired the young guitarist, songwriter and future superstar Rodney Crowell for her Hot Band and made his song “Bluebird Wine” the first song on her first post-Parsons album. She recorded tunes by other borderline-marginal people who would become songwriting giants, too: Townes Van Zandt, Utah Phillips, Delbert McClinton, Parton and, almost always, Parsons. One of her rare writing credits in those early days was on the gospel-tinged “Boulder to Birmingham,” an attempt to wrestle with the loss of Parsons, reportedly to a drug and alcohol overdose after he had finished recording the album “Grievous Angel” with Harris as his chief collaborator. Co-written with Bill Danoff, it is a majestic, mournful look down at a wrecked relationship and the feeling of having to go on afterward. In a just world, “Boulder to Birmingham” would be the tune under discussion here. Harris can do sweet ‘50s pop tunes beautifully, sure, but embodying emotional ache is where her voice is unparalleled.
Anyway: Harris, Ronstadt and Parton, a mutual admiration circle, got together in the late 1970s and recorded a bunch of tracks together including “Mr. Sandman.” I could find no record of how it was chosen. But if you’re thinking of harmony tunes for three famous voices to revive, one that was a multi-week No. 1 smash for a female vocal quartet just a couple of decades earlier is not a great imaginative leap.
Their album together did not come out, not that decade at least, for reasons apparently having to do with record companies not being able to work out their competing interests in the talent. (It would take until 1987 for the three-person supergroup to get back together and actually put out an album—called Trio—and it became Harris’s biggest commercial success. A second Trio record eventually followed.)
A few of the tracks from those first sessions moved on to the trio’s solo albums. Harris grabbed “Mister Sandman” for her 1981 Evangeline record. To be allowed to release it as a single, though, she had to rerecord the Parton and Ronstadt parts herself (which makes it much less vocally interesting, sorry). And in April 1981, it peaked at No. 37 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Emmylou Harris had officially become (and remains to this day) a pop-chart “one-hit wonder.” But to lump her in with the Kajagoogoos and the Dexy’s Midnight Runnerses of the world is to blaspheme.
For one thing, she’s had country hits aplenty, although surely not as many as she could have had if she had played the game differently. More important, Harris’ artistry has only deepened as she’s aged into a kind of elder stateswoman musical adulthood. There’s a really touching video out there of the young Swedish duo First Aid Kit performing their song “Emmylou”—“about the joy and the magic of singing together with someone that you love,” they explain—for an audience that includes Emmylou:

The thing that affirmed her stature across genres was 1995’s Wrecking Ball, on which superproducer Daniel Lanois (U2, Peter Gabriel) created resonant soundscapes to surround Harris’s more-ethereal-than-ever vocals on songs by old friends (Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams) and up-and-comers (Gillian Welch). 2000’s sort-of-sequel Red Dirt Girl used similar sonic treatments, this time showcasing songs mostly written by Harris herself. The collective effect was to crown her a, if not the, Queen of Americana, a title she has carried gracefully into more recent years. 
All along, of course, she’s been the backing vocalist’s backing vocalist, starting with Parsons and moving on to Bob Dylan, early Ryan Adams, Bright Eyes, Steve Earle, Bonnie Raitt and seemingly countless others. Picking out Harris’s warm, plaintive trill behind the lead vocalist on a recording is like seeing the Underwriters Laboratory seal on an electrical product: quality assured.
Beyond the Ronstadt-Parton collaborations, she’s made some great duet records. An album and tour with Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler (2006’s All the Roadrunning) is probably the most successful, and top to bottom it’s a delight; try “This Is Us” for a joyful but starkly realistic take on a longstanding relationship. More recently, she finally got back together with Crowell for a pair of partner records that come off as effortless, veteran excellence; Crowell even rewrote some of “Bluebird Wine” from his grayer perspective for the first of the albums, 2013’s Old Yellow Moon. But the hidden gem amid the partnerships might be the 1999 record she made with just Ronstadt called Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions. At its best when it’s stripped down and intimate, it showcases two singular voices blending and bouncing off of each other in ways that her work with the male duet partners, more ordinary singers than Ronstadt, simply does not.
As near as I can tell, Emmylou Harris has never disrespected “Mr. Sandman” in the manner of some people I can think of. In one print interview, she laments that circumstances did not allow her to sing it live with Ronstadt and Parton. In a 1985 concert from Cincinnati that’s available online, she introduces the song by calling it “the Jane Fonda of vocalizing”; in context, I assume that means it’s a hard, even aerobically challenging, song to sing.
I will grant her that. It’s probably a fun song to sing, too. Unlike a Fonda workout video, it’s certainly over quickly enough. But for those of us in the non-singing community, it’s easier to think of “Sandman” as an exception proving the rule: If this is what it takes to put Emmylou Harris on the pop charts, then the pop charts be damned.
Still, for finally getting me to listen to that Ronstadt collaboration, and to pay closer attention to the richly traditional Trio albums, I do have “Mr. Sandman” to thank. I will think of it fondly as I never ever listen to it again.

A longtime Chicago Tribune arts reporter, Steve Johnson is a freelance writer in Chicago.