round 2

(12) aimee mann, “one”
washed down
(4) TALKING HEADS, “TAKE ME TO THE RIVER”
316-187
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SWEET 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/11/22.

HANNAH ENSOR ON TALKING HEADS’ “TAKE ME TO THE RIVER”

My dad used to really like fly fishing. Canoeing. He would go on trips all over to very good rivers, catch fish, put them back in the river, etc. I went fishing with him a couple of times, he taught me how to cast and that was that. I was very little then. I saw a tweet recently suggesting that there comes a moment in your adult life when you have to pick the 1-2 interests that will dictate the gifts that your family gives you for the rest of your life. Our home, the one I grew up in, is filled with fly-fishing stained-glass windows, picture frames, mugs. They do not help my dad feel seen or understood.

We went to see A River Runs Through It on a family road trip through Colorado. In a theater. At some point, my mom covered my eyes. A River Runs Through It is rated PG, and includes momentary nudity as well as swearing, substance abuse. More concerning is the almost constant racism, which has no impact on the MPAA ratings. Common Sense Media says it’s fine for kids 13+, which makes me wonder what “PG-13” is for if not this. In the summer of 1992, I would have been almost but not yet 6. Can that be right? I remember 1992 well enough. My own child is not yet 2, won’t remember any of this.

My dad is a big Stop Making Sense guy. I’m sure that by the time I was 5-not-yet-6 I would have watched Stop Making Sense with my dad at least once. I did not know that “Take Me to The River” was a cover of an Al Green song, nor had I ever heard any of the album versions of the Talking Heads songs that were in this live performance.

Stop Making Sense was filmed over several concerts in LA in late 1983, 3 years before I was born. “Take Me to The River”—Al Green’s original version—was released in 1974, with the Talking Heads’ album version following 4 years later, on 1978’s More Songs About Buildings and Food.

My first R-rated movie was The Firm, on a family road trip the following summer. I re-watched The Firm recently on a streaming service. It was fine! Traveling with two kids must have been a lot of work. I can imagine putting this child of mine in a seat and facing her toward a screen for ninety minutes, though when I imagine it I’m probably too tired to cover her eyes. The Firm came out in 1993—a cover of John Grisham’s original which had been published 2 years earlier.

I keep asking my dad if he’ll go canoeing with me now that I live in Michigan again. I guess I keep waiting for him to go to the river so I can go to the river, but I’m closer to 40 than to 6 and I can take myself to the river. I do want to go with him, though. Not to be dramatic, but I don’t know that I know how to go to a river without him. Maybe I’d be more successful in my requests if I asked him to watch Stop Making Sense with me instead. I am still exhausting my parents, 35-not-yet-36.

When my now-wife and I were first dating I rented Stop Making Sense to insist she watch it with me. We lived in Tucson, where in my first week I drove to the place that google maps said was a thick blue line and guess what I found, well I’ll tell you. An empty wash! This was the river! No dipping or dropping in the water. Instead of a dip in a river, I got punk bands; bats; emotionally exhausting creative writing workshops; long- and short-haired queers; hot dogs wrapped in bacon and smothered in beans. A trade I’d make again in a heartbeat.

Dog-sitting in that first September in Tucson, I walked a tiny being (maybe 8, 9 pounds) along this dry river wash and imagined us both being taken up by a raptor or a coyote: ragged fur, ready. Other times, it would rain fast, and I would think about sudden water, high and dangerous, quick, carrying everything loose (me, dog) away. The owner of this sweet tiny dog, luckily, was not made aware of my fantasies of becoming prey to the wash.

I will likely watch Stop Making Sense with my child. I have already played her my dad’s copy of Stan Getz’s album with Gerry Mulligan, one of his favorites from his younger life; I have cuddled her while wearing his old backpacking shirt. When I ask her if she’s ready to go to Nana and Papa’s house, she whispers “pah-pah” and makes the sound of a clock.

“Dad taught me how to play guitar,” Eva Cassidy says at the end of her live recording of “Take Me To The River.” At the beginning of Al Green’s recording he says, “I’d like to dedicate this song to Little Junior Parker, a cousin of mine, he's gone on but we'd like to kinda carry on in his name.” The middle of the Stop Making Sense version of “Take Me to The River” is when David Byrne introduces the band: Bernie, Jerry, Ednah, Lynn, Chris, Steve, Alex, and Tina.

My dad and I are the same person, which means we sometimes get annoyed at each other for the things that annoy us about ourselves. You know this story and probably have a similar one of your own. I love my dad and I like him. A lot. And the more work I do on forgiving myself for being human, the more access I have to loving him, liking him, spending time with him joyfully. This is life, it turns out; work that I get to keep doing.

A River Runs Through It is about two siblings, one reserved and one rebellious, the two sons of a minister. This does and does not describe my sister and me.

“Take Me to The River” is the Talking Heads’ only cover. David Byrne didn’t want to get famous for playing someone else’s song. I am currently listening to it on a streaming service (stream) whose name refers to water (its tides) and is known for being slightly better for musicians, royalties-wise, than its primary competitors. If you’ve ever read an article about “Take Me to The River” it’ll mention this: the most royalties that Al Green saw from “Take Me to The River” came from the licensing for the novelty toy, Big Mouth Billy Bass. Al Green was a fan of the Talking Heads version and joked that maybe he’d cover one of their songs next. I once did spreadsheets for a music producer, which made me think: oh shit, I should be a music producer. I won't say any more because I respect confidentiality. 

If you are paying for the most expensive Tidal membership they say that “Up to 10% of your subscription is directed to the artists you listen to the most.” I keep seeing signs with language like this—at the McDonalds by my parents’ house, at Kroger—saying “starting up to $15/hour” which is a similar 21st century rhetorical move; every time, it takes me about three minutes of thinking to figure out that they’re saying there’s no way we’re hiring you at 15.

For all the optical grooves I put in my dad’s copy of the Stop Making Sense CD, I don’t know that I’d listened to Al Green’s original or the Talking Heads’ album version of “Take Me to The River” more than… I don’t know, twice? four times? So I get to encounter More Songs About Buildings and Food as if it’s new. Somewhere around 2 minutes into this version of “Take Me to The River,” some strange idiophonic sounds tinkle in. Is it a cheap-ish (padouk?) xylophone played with the backs of the rattan mallets? It is, actually, a bit more like water dripping this way. David Byrne has said that he was drawn to this song to be the band’s only cover because it “combines teenage lust with baptism.” 

As for superior sound quality, I recently became the steward of some very good wireless headphones that belonged to my dad, great audio, very nice, and when no one could find them I promised I’d get them back. I did eventually find them, but only after nine feet of basement water receded back into the ground.

“I don't know why she treated me so bad / After all the things that we could have had / Love is a notion that I can't forget.” I sing along to this in the car, even when I know with almost absolute certainty that if I am thinking of particular past loves it was me who was the problem, and that all the relationships that needed to end (even if I didn’t think so at the time) ended when they needed to. 

Listened again. Mallets maybe turned the right way. Or maybe at 2 min they’re turned backwards (still yes I think rattan not birch), and at 3 min they’re flipped. Wood mallets? Plastic? Small heads, teeny tiny, maybe meant for glockenspiel not xylophone. This is the kind of thing you can’t google, but you can maybe argue with your dad about. My dad’s got an ear for what I don’t, of course: he’s a fan of Tina Weymouth’s bass work. According to Wikipedia, she plays a hollowbody Hofner 500/2 Club bass. Insert Big Mouth Billy joke here.

I told myself that I’d write this whole essay without quoting any lyrics or talking about percussion. Alas! Here we are. Love is an ocean that you can’t forget. Love is an ocean that you can’t regret. Love is an ocean you can regret. 

Would you like to be a singer? Get that grit in your soft throat. We’ve listened to this half a million times. David Byrne can be very precise and he can be very flowy. It’s happening now; a loose wrist. You really have to practice to get your wrist loose, some time spent in lessons just relaxing physically. Swinging your arms back and forth until they flop. When you are a musician you really have to—well I won’t talk about it here. I’m retired and was never very good despite all the years.

You want to be a musician? Eyeshadow, sweat shorts, pure pleasure, talent, joy, synthesizer calmly, stomping in unison, mirroring. There is some pain inside of hand-drumming of any kind. When you like being weird and making cool things and running in place and music, this is possible. It can be so tiring to be a musician, just the arms alone.

I was born into a world in which incredibly interesting things had already happened.

Many heads had already shaken, sweaty. Many toes tapped. Many gray linens worn. Many rivers dipped into and turned away from.  When I was born my dad loved fly-fishing, had the records he loved, a whole life. Al Green was already a pastor by the time I was born. Word is, at an early screening of Stop Making Sense, the audience was so wrapped up with dancing in the aisles they didn’t realize David Byrne was there, dancing with them.

Time isn’t after us. Time isn’t holding up.

Hannah Ensor is the author of Love Dream with Television (Noemi Press, 2018). They live half a mile from the Huron River.

Not the Loneliest Cover You Could Ever Do: brooke champagne on aimee mann’s “one” 

Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one.

She first made herself known not through sight, but sound. What did she sound like? Like a cartoon bubble bursting over my head. Like the bright pop sound Andy Williams makes in the chorus of The Chordettes’ 1958 song “Lollipop,” sticking his forefinger into his cheek and uncorking the champagne bottle of his mouth. Half-believing I dreamed the pop, I stood up from bed at 2 a.m. and felt a slow leaking, as if my body had forgotten how to hold itself together. At first I thought I was pissing myself. Suddenly, about a gallon of bloody water emptied from my vagina. 
My daughter was due in almost a month, but she’d be arriving today. Still, I had reasons to remain calm. The hospital was only one backroad mile away. My husband slept soundly next to my wet spot, but there was no need to wake him yet to pack a bag. I’d read that we wouldn’t need to leave till contractions were four minutes apart, and that was likely hours away. All I needed was my phone timer and something to do. And I knew just what that was. “Okay, this is good,” I thought. “I have papers to grade.”
It was the middle of the fall semester and I had subs to cover my classes, but I didn’t want to leave them with a full set of ungraded memoirs. Besides, I like reading student memoirs. What’s a “bad” one look like? Too self-centered? Too incomplete a narrative arc? Screw all that. My students share their lives with me. They may not completely plumb the depths of why things happen the way they do or what it all means, but they’re getting there. They open up to me in ways they may not with their parents, in ways that—holy shit—my daughter might also close off to me someday. Yes, I was already this far afield while in labor, timing contractions, while also commenting on my students’ uses of reflection and scene as I entered in grades ranging from A-minus to A-plus. Then, I was somewhere twenty years in the future: who would this early girl be, and what would she mean to me. I couldn’t imagine the answer; the question itself was terrifying.
In fact, the question required further distraction, so I scrolled through my DirecTV guide to where I usually find it: HBO. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia had just started—a perfect movie for the desperation I was masking. Then, I was nearly twenty years in the past, first watching the movie and hearing the dial tone as the song “One” begins, beep beep beep beep. The singer leaned on the word “one” so deeply, so coolly, “one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…” The opening film credits revealed a magnolia blossoming at hyper-speed, followed by the slow unraveling of sad, lonely characters I would spend the next three hours only half paying attention to. Like I said, I’d seen them all before.

Now I spend my time just making thoughts of yesterday.

She first made herself known not through sound, but sight. In my second year of college, my mom’s best friend Gloria burned me a CD with a homemade cover design. She often made me gifts like this, introduced me to R.E.M. and Radiohead and all the Gen X coolness I’d always been slightly too young for. On this CD, a long, lanky woman, blonde and cool-looking, like Gloria herself, wore a tankini and her name written in script across her body: Aimee Mann. Oh boy, I thought, another beautiful, blonde singer. But I trusted Gloria. She’d never married or had kids, and so from my purview her life comprised of great-art consumption, astute political commentary, and believing in me. She cheered my amorphous writing ambitions, even masochistically asked to read early drafts.
Gloria wasn’t an artist, but loved art in all its forms. She could name all the architects who designed her favorite buildings in our hometown of New Orleans, and she was fun; she knew every rooftop bar in town. Because my mother spent much of her adult life raising three daughters, three stepdaughters, and cycling through three husbands, she didn’t have as much time to slow down, pay attention. Whether or not a piece of art or music or film was beautiful didn’t much matter. My mother rarely analyzed, or let a thought or feeling linger. She accepted a breadth or dearth of beauty, and moved on. At that time, in college, I saw in these two women two discrete paths for womanhood. The Gloria path was glorious. Freedom, one-ness, living life mostly for yourself. Though my mother is no martyr, I feared choosing her path would mean my own martyrdom. To be encumbered, constantly needed and tired, having little time to contemplate art and the self in the one life I was living. I needed time. I wanted to write, to make art, like this childless, beautiful Aimee Mann.
Because I wanted to impress Gloria, I didn’t just listen to Aimee Mann, I studied her. I read somewhere that Anderson wrote the screenplay with Mann in mind, that he wanted his movie to be the equivalent of an Aimee Mann album. In that sense, the film was a cover of Mann’s musical oeuvre established in the early-mid 90s. The soundtrack’s first song, “One,” opens the film, and it wasn’t immediately my favorite. The song contains no images. It’s pure argumentative lament. When I first heard the album from start to finish, I was most gripped by the track “Save Me.” It begins with the lines, “You look like a perfect fit / For a girl in need of a tourniquet.” If you’ve ever really loved someone who’s damaged, or been that damaged person, it’s a perfect simile.
Anyway, “One” is an ostensibly simple song with simple lyrics. The relationship referenced is one where a presumed lover, or loved one, is gone. That’s all we know. When I first heard it, the English major in me found it fascinating to hear that one was a number you could “do.” As in: enact, or perform. The rest of the song felt pointless to deconstruct. “One” is lonely, “no is the saddest experience…”, yes, I get it. I remember sometime after Gloria burned the CD for me, I asked her what she thought of the song, to confirm if I was correct about it. She laughed and said, “Well, yeah, it’s sad, but ‘one’ isn’t always the loneliest number.” Given that I planned to take her solitary path, I was glad to hear it.
Over the years, as I dug further into Mann’s oeuvre, I learned “One” was a cover with interesting tweaks to the 1968 Harry Nilsson original. Mann’s version includes an electric guitar, and her tone makes the song’s argument more starkly than Nilsson. He sings “one is the loneliest number” like it’s a suggestion; when Mann sings it, “one’s” loneliness is fact. But what I love most about the cover is how much Mann relies on Nilsson’s voice, both at the opening and closing of the song. In the opening, just after the beep beep of the dial tone, we hear a male voice shout, “Okay, Mr. Mix!” Which feels totally weird and nonsensical. Turns out it’s Nilsson, from another of his tracks called “Cuddly Toy.” And as “One’s” final cryptic line concludes—one is a number divided by two—Mann’s voice recedes, and Nilsson’s enters again. He sings the following lines, which are not lyrics from “One,” but from another of his songs called “Together”:

And one has decided to bring down the curtain
And one thing’s for certain
There’s nothing to keep them together.

I knew none of this when I obsessively listened to the soundtrack, but hearing a song titled “Together” superimposed over “One” is a bit ironic, and something that two decades ago, I could’ve written an A-plus paper about. Now, thinking about my relationship with Gloria, the song, and my daughter, who six years ago was in the process of being born as I listened to “One” while timing contractions, I’m considering the nature of covers. What makes a good cover? What should a cover song do? As in: enact, or perform. According to Ray Padgett’s book on cover songs called Cover Me, musicians worried for years that if their song was covered successfully, that meant an erasure of their original. Padgett vehemently disagrees with that conclusion. For him, a cover expands the original, adds new textures and contexts, invites a new audience to enjoy the update and revisit the old. In other words, a successful cover only makes the original stronger.

It's just no good anymore since you went away.

She made herself known that balmy January day of 2022 not through sight, or sound, but smell. Warm jambalaya and cold, olive-stuffed muffulettas waited upstairs at Schoen & Son Funeral Home on Canal Street in New Orleans, where my mother and I would eat after we’d said goodbye to Gloria.
Though I didn’t speak at the memorial, I thought a lot about what I’d say. One of the things that made Gloria the best was that she was legitimately interested in what I thought, which stroked my ego in a way my busy mother couldn’t always do. But she was also interested in everyone else, too. There was some artistry, I suppose, in how she plumbed the depths of why people were the way they were. This is why she had so many conservative friends despite being one of the most politically liberal people I knew. Proof was all around me in the hundreds at the memorial, a great gathering of both the masked and unmasked.
The first to eulogize her was a young attorney, one of many for whom Gloria worked at the downtown law firm where she and my mother were legal secretaries for almost four decades. The attorney made a joke about the great unmasked, saying it was a testament to Gloria’s patience and grace that there were so many Trump supporters in the room. It reminded me that when Trump first came down that godforsaken escalator, right around the time Gloria was diagnosed with breast cancer (proof that if there’s a god, he’s a bastard), I raged and scoffed at the stupidity of anyone who could consider this monstrous moron as anything but a joke. Gloria reminded me that listening to others’ wrong-headed ideas only strengthens our positions, because we’re empathizing where they won’t.
Over a dozen people spoke beautifully at the memorial, including members of the great unmasked, but it was her college-aged niece whose impromptu speech most touched me. “I didn’t plan to say anything, but, my Aunt Gloria, there’s probably no other person as responsible for making me who I am as she was. She shared with me what was good, what was cool. Every piece of music I listen to or television I watch and love is because of her. I can’t imagine not being able to talk to her about any of it anymore.”
But silence touched me as well. During the parade of memorial speakers, I asked my mother if she wanted to say something, said I’d hold her hand and walk up there with her, if she liked. She just gently shook her head, and later, in the privacy of plating our jambalaya and muffulettas, said it’d been enough for her to tell Gloria’s family everything she felt, what losing her meant—losing the best friend she’d ever had, losing a piece of herself. In Gloria’s final days under home hospice care, Mom had been with her. She held her hand, watched her slowly go. She didn’t need to enact or perform her love.

One is a number divided by two

It’s sad, embarrassing really, how much I learned about Gloria from her obituary and memorial, simple facts I’d never bothered asking her about. Like me, she attended Nicholls State in Thibodaux, LA (a.k.a. Harvard on the Bayou), and graduated from LSU. How had we never discussed that? She was born earlier than I’d thought, in 1958, the same year, in fact, that Andy Williams swiped inside his cheek in the chorus of The Chordettes’ “Lollipop,” the very first sound I conjured when my water broke. The song “Lollipop” itself is a cover, first recorded by a long-forgotten duo named Ronald & Ruby. The oddly, wonderfully comparable sound would’ve never entered my mind upon my daughter’s arrival had it not been for The Chordettes and Andy Williams’ famous pop.
Covers are so ubiquitous now that we take for granted the term itself—why they’re called covers at all—and as stated in Padgett’s Cover Me, there are three theories for its derivation. The first is that a music label would “cover its bets” by releasing a recording of a popular song; in the second, the idea was that new version would literally “cover up” the old on record store shelves; and the third, most capitalistic theory was how music label execs would answer, when asked if they had any copycat versions of a popular song to release: “we’ve got it covered!”
I can’t help but find a metaphor in these theories, and how they apply to the relationships I’ve held most dearly. Having a child is a way to cover your bets: if you can’t get everything you want out of this life, maybe your child can. Maybe they can cover up your shittiness, your aging, your (hopefully) slow bodily unraveling. If you choose to have children, a secret, sacred hope is that when you get old, they’ll care for you; they’ll have you covered.
Before deciding to have children, and still, I’ve been both afraid to be covered, and afraid not to be. I’ve feared motherhood would mean half-measures in artistry, and vice versa. And I’ve feared the obverse: that without motherhood, I’d have no excuse, no cover, for my mediocre art. But in listening to “One” again to write this essay, perhaps more obsessively than I did twenty years ago, after re-hearing the lament and singularity of being one, I see that although I planned to take Gloria’s path, and instead took my mother’s, the two paths weren’t discrete at all. The overlap lives in their love for each other. “One” can be sad, but “two” can be, too, and children won’t always cover our loneliness, or any other parts of us that need covering. This essay is an inadequate cover for the originality, the oneness, of Gloria. And of Aimee Mann. And of being a mother to my daughter and a daughter to my mother. But I’m making this cover, anyway. I’m still singing the song I’ve heard before, only singing it differently.
I’ve learned, too, that just the concept of covers is relatively modern. Before the advent of rock n’ roll, it was the song that was paramount, not the singer. The quality of the song mattered more than the person performing it. So to extend that cover-as-relationship metaphor, if my daughter is my cover, the question isn’t what she makes of me, or I of her; the singular song she makes of her life is what counts. My daughter, my cover, who first made herself known, truly, not through sight or sound or smell, but touch. After twelve hours of labor, when she crowned, then blinked, then screamed, I brought her to my breast, and tasted what it was for me to be born into someone irrevocably different, both alone and not alone, not joined together anymore, but not two, either, and never quite one again.

Brooke Champagne was born and raised in New Orleans, LA and now writes and teaches in Tuscaloosa at the University of Alabama. She was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her piece “Exercises,“ which was published in The Normal School and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2019, and was a finalist for the 2019 Lamar York Prize in Nonfiction for her essay “Bugginess.” Her writing has appeared widely in print and online journals, most recently in Under the Sun, Barrelhouse, and Hunger Mountain. She is seeking publication for her first collection of personal essays entitled Nola Face.