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.