The Perfect Song

To lots of music fans it sounds pretty bold and even naive to suggest that any song is “perfect”. Especially from someone who’s not a professional musician. But the criteria for the perfect song is pretty simple: after countless listens, it still grabs you from the start and captivates you right through to the end. You never get sick of it, because it gives you goosebumps even after the thousandth listen. It makes you stare at the stereo. It keeps you in your driveway for minutes after you’ve parked. It stops you dead in your tracks if you’re walking. You play it for every single music fan you meet along the way, trying to sell them on its epic perfection.

Lots of songs from all kinds of genres can do this. There’s no single perfect tune. I could list dozens from the humble music collection I’ve assembled over the years. Perfectly orchestrated tracks of rhythm, lyrics, and melody. There are certain elements – like a line or a solo – that help propel these songs above everything else you’ve ever heard. But it’s the package as a whole that makes the perfect song transcend body and spirit. For me, one of those songs is Ween‘s “Buenos Tardes Amigo”.

It’s track 13 on the band’s 1994 breakthrough album Chocolate and Cheese. From New Hope, Pennsylvania, Ween has an eclectic catalogue of albums with songs that range from rock to country to synth-pop. Many of their song titles and lyrics lean on the bizarre, and they’ve been long considered a “joke” band by many critics. But their musical talent and dedication have built them a strong fan base that keeps growing and obscures those premature “novelty” labels. And it’s a song like “Buenos Tardes Amigo” that proves it.

The song is seven minutes and seven seconds of an epic narrative about jealousy, vengeance, and murder in a small Mexican village. It opens with a slow A minor chord on the acoustic guitar. It’s a stable, soothing constant in a song that spins modestly out of control. The rhythmic strumming is the foundation – like looking at the tortilla shell of a mystery quesadilla and not really knowing what’s in it. As the story progresses, a synthetic arrangement of strings in the background gets louder. The stripped-down and slow faux salsa rhythm gives way to actual drums, and it climaxes in one of the simplest yet most haunting guitar solos anyone has ever played. And then the last verse: a chilling twist of a denouement that will have you skipping back to the beginning of the song as soon as it’s done, just to hear the story again.

That narrative is really what carries “Buenos Tardes Amigo”. But every instrument attached to it intensifies the story exponentially. I’ll leave it up to you to Google the lyrics, but you should really listen to the song before reading them. Ween is my favourite band and I’ve had the fortune of seeing them a half dozen times over the past ten years, but I’ve only heard them play this live once – the first time I saw them at the Warehouse in Toronto in the summer of 1999. Maybe that elusiveness adds to the song’s intrigue for me. But this is the first song that got me hooked on the band, and if you ask any other Ween fan they’ll say the same thing.

It’s a timeless masterpiece I’ll never get sick of. I hang on every word, every note, and every beat. I get the shivers every time I hear that slow guitar solo heavily soaked in reverb. And for me, it’s a perfect song.

Hey Hey My My

It was a mild and breezy summer evening. And as the sun set in the Prairie sky behind me, crunchy, decades-old power chords carried across the football stadium, thrilling young ears and triggering memories in the older ones. Forty-six thousand people from all walks of life – young and old alike – were absolutely elated that AC/DC was back in Winnipeg. A band with timeless radio and cult classics that span nearly four decades was here to do what it does best: rock out. It was my first time seeing the classic rock heroes, and I was just as stoked. But I soon realized I was stuck in the middle of an inter-generational passing of the rock torch. I sat beside a girl in her early teens and her dad, who were singing along to even the seediest of hits like “Whole Lotta Rosie”. And they weren’t the only family there. At this solitary show I finally saw the proof of what I’ve long believed: rock n’ roll is the most resilient genre of popular music; and as the old saying goes, it will never die.

There are standards in rock music like no other. The archetypes who wrote the blueprints will always appeal to 13-year-old kids just as much today as they did 30 years ago. It will always be cool to like Led Zeppelin. There’ll never be another rock guitar god quite like Hendrix. And few contemporary bands will write party anthems as well as AC/DC could. And that’s why people who grew up listening to them will keep bringing their kids to their shows. The rock show is both a cliche and a rite of passage in itself, but at the end of the day it’s still an unforgettable spectacle that people will continue to flock to. A massive, blow-up Rosie doll and cannons to close out the show? I’m glad I didn’t miss out on that.

Cliches aside, as resilient as rock music is, it falls short in versatility. Its glory days brought huge social upheaval with them, but it’s lacked that universal appeal for more than 20 years now. Rap was a new artistic vision created to speak to a growing demographic of young black people. It boomed, and has its own cliches today, but still it draws in new young fans in a way that rock can’t. Rock also can’t get people dancing like electronic music. And its emotion pales hugely in comparison to the heartache in any country twang.

But nothing compares to live rock music. The shows will always sell out. The classics will never get old. They’ll continue to infect the ears of the young for decades to come. I grew up listening to everything – from Metallica and Guns N’ Roses to Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys in the late 1980s. Those tastes branched rapidly like a tree on steroids in the early 1990s, as I started going to shows like Lollapalooza. I still try to keep as much of an open mind as I can to this day when it comes to new music. But I know when it comes time to take my kids to shows, it’ll be to the new generation of classics, like Radiohead, Pearl Jam, Queens of the Stone Age, and Tool. Bands that I can count on still being around when I’m in my 40s.

The Guatemala Tour Diaries: Semuc Champey

The last five days in Guatemala revolved around vans, broken Spanish, hymns, and bugs. I’ll save some of that for final thoughts on my time there. But in between all that we took a tour way off the beaten path to one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. Semuc Champey is a collection of natural limestone pools set deep in a valley along the Cahabon River. While the trip for me up to this point was an introspective analysis of indigenous longevity and the eternal impact of colonialism, this was an opportunity to step away from that inner anthropological wresting match and return to my natural place on Mother Earth. Here, we were all animals again. It was a very primitive and humbling experience.

The pictures here will never do it justice. But if you’ve ever been in a place where nature has totally overpowered you, you’ll know how I felt.

Stay tuned for the conclusion.