Jewel, "Foolish Games"

Song: "Foolish Games"
Artist: Jewel
Album: Pieces Of You
Written by: Jewel Kilcher
Year: 1995
Key: Dm (E♭m in single version)
Classification: SF2
Lyrical content: the drama you've been craving (is losing its luster); inability to use an umbrella = sexy
Where used: verse

Jewel

I remember a time in 1995 when Jewel was scheduled to play a very small club in Houston, and the word on the street was that you didn't want to miss this girl if you could help it. If you pointed out that she was only 21 years old with just a guitar and no history of any kind, you were met with the observation that you'd just described Bob Dylan at the time of his first album. Faced with the threat of missing out on the latest Next Dylan, I took the easy way out: I found a conflict and I avoided that whole mess entirely.

Even so, I was quite happy to admit that I thought that Jewel made the radio a better place in 1995-1996. Not, like, a whole lot better, but I certainly smiled a small but measurable amount and stopped flipping around the dial every time I stumbled across one of her songs. When I finally succumbed to the inevitable and purchased Pieces Of You a few years later, I discovered the frustrating truth, which is that the singles that were getting airplay were getting airplay precisely because they were just about the only listenable songs on the album. Everything else was incredibly precious, quasi-poetic and self-consciously "deep."

It had the unfortunate result of casting a pall retroactively on songs that I had previously liked, one of which was "Foolish Games." Previously, I'd been able to dismiss the overwrought drama as an anomaly that was easily counterbalanced with a heart-tugging vocal and melody. I'd eventually realize that they were all intertwined. (I would also learn that the single version was a completely different recording in a completely different key -- bumped up from Dm to E♭m -- which was enough to change the entire thrust of her vocal.) Considering the lyrics -- blagging on about art, rife with self-loathing in the company of a guy who sounds for all the world like a pretentious, narcissistic d-bag -- she almost had no choice but to use the SFCP. Is "Foolish Games" sensitive? Oh, my, yes; not only does the word pop up in the song itself, this is the singer, after all, who included on her debut a song actually called "I'm Sensitive." Everything that the SFCP is can be found right here, right down to the bleeding heart and borderline-tearful delivery. It's the kind of story, and the kind of guy, that can move a 22-year-old to romantic agony and ten years later make the same person hang her head in abashed disbelief that she was ever naive enough to fall for his line. And although she has a very long way to go, if you listen closely enough to the chorus, you can hear Jewel in the process of starting to grow from the former woman in to the latter.

Full song: Jewel, "Foolish Games"
Listen to the SFCP clip for this song

The Postal Service, "Grow Old With Me"

Song: "Grow Old With Me"
Artist: The Postal Service
Album: Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign To Save Darfur
Written by: John Lennon
Year: 2007
Key: Em
Classification: SF2
Lyrical content: let's love each other for as long (or as little) as we have left; vow, interrupted
Where used: verse



Since I started maintaining a year-by-year list of the songs I've been able to identify as using the SFCP in some capacity, a few folks have noticed what seems to be an increase in its popularity in the last few years. I certainly hope so, as that was somewhat at the core of the article that started this mess at the end of 2008. If you're looking for a song emblematic of the sense that the SFCP has been on the rise, you could do a whole lot worse than the Postal Service's "Grow Old With Me."

The reason for that is simple: the song's a cover, and there was no SFCP in John Lennon's version. There didn't need to be. It was already almost unbearably heartbreaking in its original incarnation, which came out in 1984. It wasn't even that Lennon's murder three years earlier altered our perception of the song; outside of his inner circle, there wasn't one single person who wasn't painfully aware from the very first time they ever heard it that the sweet invitation and implicit promise that he was offering to his beloved could never be realized. When it was recorded, the song was a celebration; by the time it reached the public, it was a sad fantasy.

All of that happened without the SFCP. But that was during the early 1980s. By the time the Postal Service took their turn at it in 2007, it was in the thick of a veritable SFCP boom. Whether Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello had that in mind or not, the fact remains that their recording altered the verses to revolve around a SFCP absent in the original, and they did it at a time when the progression was beginning to pick up substantial steam. (If inserting a ubiquitous chord progression into a song written without it isn't reflective of prevailing musical trends, then we are working off of different definitions of "trend.") The resultant version was moody and ominous where Lennon's was warm and open. It's not clear that Lennon himself would have agreed with the darkness that the Postal Service gave to his song, but then, it had already been irrevocably, fundamentally altered before it ever saw the light of day.

Full song: The Postal Service, "Grow Old With Me"
Listen to the SFCP clip for this song

Attack Attack!, "Stick Stickly"

Song: "Stick Stickly"
Artist: Attack Attack!
Album: Someday Came Suddenly
Written by: Austin Carlile/John Carlo/Johnny Frank/Caleb Shomo/Andrew Wetzel/Andrew Whiting
Year: 2008
Key: C#m
Classification: SF2
Lyrical content: peace and patience through God, without stinting on the volume or speed; John 3:16 (by way of Revelation 13:11)
Where used: outro



They tell me that this type of music is referred to as "crabcore." Spend mere seconds with the video above and you'll figure out why. I wasn't aware that such a thing existed until just recently. Now I share it with you because I must.

I can't tell you how delighted I am that this song uses the SFCP. Just really, really happy.

Full song: Attack Attack!, "Stick Stickly"
Listen to the SFCP clip for this song

The Offspring, "The Kids Aren't Alright"

Song: "The Kids Aren't Alright"
Artist: The Offspring
Album: Americana
Written by: Dexter Holland
Year: 1998
Key: B♭m
Classification: SF2
Lyrical content: the streets claim another victim; pretty heavy (for a joke band)
Where used: verse, chorus

I was rolling my eyes at the Offspring by the time "The Kids Aren't Alright" came around. The first two singles from Americana had squandered just about any goodwill I'd developed towards the band in the five years since they had become a big deal. "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)" wallowed in all of the dumbest clichés of casual racism while convincing itself that it was mocking them, and the appeal of "Why Don't You Get A Job?" seemed to rest entirely on the fact that the first line was "My friend's got a girlfriend and he hates that bitch." So feel free to toss some casual sexism onto that pile, too. Both songs relied on the audience's stupidity. As punishment, they ended up being the Offspring's first entries into the Billboard Hot 100.

"The Kids Aren't Alright" was the followup single, and its impact lay partly in the fact that you're waiting for a punchline that never comes. These aren't happy-go-lucky fuckups that Dexter Holland's singing about. They had the same optimistic hopes for the future as most, only things didn't quite turn out that way. At least two of the characters turn to drugs, but instead of offering blissful withdrawal from the frustrations of the world, they put both Brandon and Mark in holes from which they won't escape. (The fact that Mark's is metaphorical doesn't make it less of a waste.) Meanwhile, the person with the best prospects fails to avoid the same fate as everybody else -- "Jenny had a chance, well, she really did/Instead she dropped out and had a couple of kids" -- and is just as stuck.

To be honest, it's all kind of a bummer, like if you front-loaded every discussion of your high school graduating class with the four biggest burnouts while conveniently ignoring everybody who achieved satisfactory mediocrity and better. And it's not as if Holland points to any root cause for these kids' dead-end lives or offers any sort of solution; he might as well be frantic and wide-eyed, shouting "This street's evil, I tells ya! Eeeeeeeeevil!" But even if lines like "The cruelest dream [is] reality" are maybe a little more overwrought than they need to be, there's something bracing about its fierce earnestness coming so close on the heels of the puerility of the Offspring's two previous singles.

Too bad it turned out nobody cared. Despite the band's track record and the song's reliance on the otherwise-charmed SFCP, "The Kids Aren't Alright" didn't make it to the Hot 100. Maybe it was just too relentlessly breakneck for the SFCP to settle in and turn the song into a proper hit. (To be fair, it did just as well on the Modern Rock and Mainstream Rock charts as "Gotta Get Away," one of the Offspring's two previous SFCP singles.) Maybe it was too serious to hook the folks who listen to pop radio. Whatever the reason, the Offspring learned their lesson and returned to sophomoric jokes and the glamorization of the clueless with their next single, "Original Prankster." It hit #70 on the Hot 100.

Full song: The Offspring, "The Kids Aren't Alright"
Listen to the SFCP clip for this song

Neutral Milk Hotel, "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"

Song: "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"
Artist: Neutral Milk Hotel
Album: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Written by: Jeff Mangum
Year: 1998
Key: Em
Classification: SF2
Lyrical content: the ghost beckons; the heart yearns for that which it does not know
Where used: bridge



I've spent much of the past few weeks immersed in Our Noise: The Story Of Merge Records, commemorating the 20th anniversary year of the label, so the time seems exactly right to talk about Neutral Milk Hotel. And yet. There's been so much said about In The Aeroplane Over The Sea over the years that I almost don't know what else I can add. I can, however, point you to Glenn McDonald's heart-stoppingly great review (one of my two favorite record reviews of all time) and Taylor Clark's excellent Slate piece tracking the whereabouts of the man who pulled a perfect album out of his head and decided, well, maybe that's enough of that. So let me just say this: it seems more obvious as the years go by that this fever dream of a record is one of the greatest albums ever recorded. Less obviously, it should also be mentioned that it is a fantastic album to run to.

That said, I've always had a hard time excerpting from it. So many songs bleed into one another that trying to put something from it on a mixtape, for instance, requires that you either cut the music flat dead at the end of the track or include more than one song. And the problem with that is that you end up with a run of three or four songs in a row, in which case, why aren't you just burning the whole album? It's not just the lack of clean gaps between tracks, though. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is an album that practically demands to be listened to in a single sitting. The second time I put it on, I had intended (as is my habit) to listen to two, maybe three songs, just to get a sense of them individually outside the flow of the album; the next thing I knew, Jeff Mangum was putting down his guitar and exiting the studio. I once saw someone posit that the album emitted, and I quote, "hypno-rays" while it played. It's not the least plausible theory I've heard.

One of the only songs that's even remotely self-contained is the title track, where we first meet the ghost that haunts Mangum over the course of the album. It's a testament to how subtly and cannily he uses the SFCP that despite the fact that I got In The Aeroplane Over The Sea not long after I first identified the SFCP and listened to it Lord knows how many times in the ten years since, it still took one of the commenters to this blog for me to actually notice that it was sitting right there in the bridge. (Thanks, Benjamin.) I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, since Mangum's accomplishment with In The Aeroplane Over The Sea has nothing to do with inventing radically new chord progressions and everything to do with what he did with them. (It's worth noting right here that the verse progression is also a mainstay: the archetypal doo-wop I-vi-IV-V, albeit used quite differently.) In a way, that's one of the album's strengths: the way Mangum takes a fistful of basic chords and transforms them in a kind of alchemy into a musical narrative that I still haven't fully gotten to the bottom of more than a decade on.

Full song: Neutral Milk Hotel, "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"
Listen to the SFCP clip for this song

Nina Gordon, "Tonight And The Rest Of My Life"

Song: "Tonight And The Rest Of My Life"
Artist: Nina Gordon
Album: Tonight And The Rest Of My Life
Written by: Nina Gordon
Year: 2000
Key: Dm
Classification: SF1 and SF2
Lyrical content: schmoop: 10; gravity: 3
Where used: verse (SF2), chorus (SF1)

So, this song. As previously discussed, I'd certainly recognized the SFCP before, but Nina Gordon is the one responsible for it becoming A Thing. Seriously, what's going on here? Gordon used to lead Veruca Salt, who weren't exactly known for getting gooshy over gentleman callers. And while they weren't always roaring quite as ferociously as "All Hail Me" or, especially, "Volcano Girls," slower numbers like "Earthcrosser" and "New York Mining Disaster 1996" weren't exactly romantic ballads. Even "Loneliness Is Worse" had a bite to it (whether by itself or in the context of Eight Arms To Hold You) that staved off sappiness.

But even if you deem "Loneliness Is Worse" a straight-up love song (as opposed to, say, a spider luring its prey to be devoured), it still can't account for the cognitive dissonance generated by "Tonight And The Rest Of My Life." There's nothing about it that's recognizable as Gordon as she'd existed prior to the song's release: not the Sarah McLachlanish vocals, not the sweeping pop production, not the pantingly purple lyrics. (Whatever your impression of Gordon's songwriting skills prior to this, she never sang of the sky catching fire, shoreless seas and the universe resting in her arms and actually meant it... in a non-metal way, at least.) The video, above, clinches it, with Gordon glammed up to the hilt and frolicking in slow motion along a generic body of water that's clearly just a tank and some sand in a studio somewhere. The first time I encountered the video (which happened to be the first time I encountered the song), it's safe to say that I stood slack-jawed in disbelief for the next five minutes.

All of which makes "Tonight And The Rest Of My Life" something akin to the apotheosis of SFCP songs. It's about as blatant an exploitation of the chord progression as you'll find, grabbing onto the hits of McLachlan, Joan Osborne, Jewel, et al. with both hands in an effort to shed off her previous career and remold herself in their image. For her troubles, Gordon got an Adult Top 40 hit (#7!) and a high-profile placement in The Notebook, and the SFCP officially got its name.

Full song: Nina Gordon, "Tonight And The Rest Of My Life"
Listen to the SFCP clip for this song

Vanessa Carlton, "Hands On Me"

Song: "Hands On Me"
Artist: Vanessa Carlton
Album: Heroes & Thieves
Written by: Vanessa Carlton/Stephan Jenkins
Year: 2007
Key: E♭m
Classification: SF2 (with a brief lapse into SF1)
Lyrical content: true love is eternal; the Dalai Lama would want us to have sex
Where used: Verse, chorus



I honestly would have thought that we, as a nation and a culture, would be over "A Thousand Miles" by now. But by gum, there it is, in approximately a third of all the commercials and previews for romantic comedies (the other two-thirds being taken up by "Unwritten" and "Suddenly I See") still, to this day. Haven't those tinkly piano cascades been played out and squeezed dry? It would seem the world believes that they haven't. Heroes & Thieves doesn't offer anything quite so egregious, though Carlton does manage to find room for the line "I'm a sycophantic courtier with an elegant repost." (That's the way "riposte" is spelled in the liner notes, so: [sic].)

To the extent that there ever was anything Sensitive and Female about the SFCP, it was probably inevitable that Carlton would eventually grab hold of it. She leans pretty heavily on it throughout but gets points for making the verse and chorus entirely different from one another despite having the exact same progression underneath both. It's still afflicted by Carlton's tendency to write lyrics like a pretentiously artsy high schooler, but it's bright and catchy. That's practically a triumph right there.

Full song: Vanessa Carlton, "Hands On Me"
Listen to the SFCP clip for this song