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A wistful anthem. A single track to evoke a sense of calm. Your suggestions?

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Here’s my suggestion. With stylistic echoes of the marvelous ‘Sullivan Street’ from Counting Crows, it’s another strange, slightly melancholic immersion in a nostalgic dreamscape. It’s suffused with bohemian surrealism; it’s looking backwards to wilder days, and somehow also carries a quiet fond peace at the promise of the present and the days ahead.

It’s the title track from Flying Cowboys, the 1989 album from Rickie Lee Jones.

Down there by the river is a man
Whose horn is twisted into shapes
Unknown to the wicked and the wise
And he bears the look of an animal
Who’s seen things no animal should ever see
He has been driven beyond all towns
And all the systems until now though it is
Long past too far he keeps going
Because it’s a desert
Because it’s a desert
We come to the river
We’ll walk away from all this now
We come to the water
We’ll walk away from all this now
She first saw him he was standing in the doorway
Illuminated from behind by a light
Though imaginary posses chased them
To these distant adobes
Standing on the cliffs today
I thought I saw you below
Walking by the river
My shadow growing smaller
It’s a desert because
Because it’s a desert
They’ll be asking me about you forever
I guess
We come to the river
We’ll walk away from all this now
We come to the water
We’ll walk away from all this now
Long coats on the prairie
Lying in the dust
Who can I turn to ?
Who can I trust ?
Were you walking on the water ?
Playing in the sun ?
But the world is turning faster
Than it did when I was young
When I was young
When I was young
Oh, when I was young I was a wild, wild one

Let’s have some more suggestions to capture the same feeling.

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Comments

  3. Track 1, Side 1, Tales From the Argyll Cycle, Volume 1 by Jackie Leven: Stranger on the Square

    A consummate celebration of all his charms, vocal, lyrical and the gift of arrangement.
    Classic.

  11. A name rarely mentioned around here is the the excellent Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn. This sprang to mind immediately; it’s called Look How Far from his album Breakfast In New Orleans… …Dinner In Tinbuktu.

  19. All these tracks feature vocals. For calm I would go for instrumentals every time. This slice of melodic house for example builds simply and gently with a wistful set of chords at the heart of it. The BPM never troubles, just georgeous.

  30. The late Tom T Hall’s albums are full of wistful songs. This cover by Leo Kottke is a personal favorite

    Always sounds to me that LK sings “what she done to” rather than “what she done for me”. If I am right, the one word effectively changes the mood and meaning of the whole song from being wistful to resentful. But then again, I might be wrong

  31. Wonderful thread, Vulpes.
    But isn’t a wistful anthem almost a contradiction in terms?

    wistful
    “having or showing a feeling of vague or regretful longing”.

    anthem
    “a rousing or uplifting song identified with a particular group, body, or cause”
    For example “the song became the anthem for hippy activists”

    Here’s one of my favourite hippy anthems. This is more for hippy inactivists.

    And while we are in Canterbury, here’s a gem of regretful longing from Robert.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXXFp-9zsCQ

  32. A good few of the clips above are blacked out for me, so apologies is this is repetition: but this might fit the bill of being both wistful and anthemic simultaneously…

  35. There’s a great new compilation of country singer Sammi Smith just out on Ace that’s wall-to-wall wistfulness. She’s a great soulful country singer – and compiler Bob Stanley has done his usual great job and pulled together a stunning range of slow-to-medium pace tunefulness – with plenty of cheatin’, lyin’, yearnin’ and cryin’ songs.

    Here’s a couple:

    The latter popped up on the great “Choctaw Ridge” comp also via Bob Stanley late last year.

  36. Two wistful dames ..

    Come into the garden, Dude.
    For the black bat, night, has flown.

    Let’s get lost down the garden path with Virginia Astley. Wistfully bucolic.

    From gardens where we feel secure

    I imagine Virginia has green fingers. Our next lady would definitely enjoy the services of a gardiner.

    The Divine’ Comedy’s exquisite portrait of an English lady of a certain age.

  41. Reggae can also be wistful. I would nominate Fisherman by the Congos, Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves (dewistified by the Clash) and even Gregory Isaac’s Night Nurse. The Cool Ruler displaying a melancholic vulnerability.

    But I’m going to post Bim Sherman’s Golden Locks.

    His album Miracle was recorded in Bombay with a full orchestra. Reggae but not as we know it.

    Oh and did I mention Wisty in Roots?

  47. Two choices.

    One is the closing two minutes of Arnold Bax’s Seventh Symphony. This was his last symphony, from about 1949 or something like that, and critics see it as his farewell to the upper echelons of the musical world. Having said all he wanted to say, the final movement of his last symphony is a wistful, nostalgic-feeling celebration of music itself… and the closing little coda right at the end is a beautiful little passage of calm. His biographer, Colin Scott-Sutherland, puts it well, calling it a “strangely cold and virginal atmosphere”.

    The catch is that you really have to listen to the whole symphony to appreciate that last little bit properly. It’s a fantastic journey.

    Second choice is this: God If I Saw Her Now by Anthony Phillips. Until this week I’d never knowingly heard of this guy (I’m not a Genesis fan), but now I can’t stop listening to his 1977 debut album (The Geese and The Ghost) and for the moment it’s my favourite LP of all time. You know that way when something you didn’t realise you were craving suddenly comes out of nowhere and hits you in the gut? This particular song is superficially a simple, folky thing with a fairly rudimentary picking pattern in the Dear Prudence vein (it sounds like he was trying to copy Dear Prudence and accidentally chanced upon an interesting chord progression), but when the flutes and jazzy chord variations come in it absolutely floors me. And the vocal by some woman I don’t know and by (yes) Phil Collins is magical.

      • Great stuff. Yeah I will need to delve more into his back catalogue.

        I had wondered why I had never heard of him, and why no one had mentioned him on here. Then I searched his name and found Barge has been dutifully reviewing his releases for about the last 8 years! I had just never noticed.

  49. Living On An Island more and more seems to be the my favourite Quo song, which is odd because I much prefer Rossi’s vocals. But there’s something that’s very vulnerable and definitely wistful about Parfitt on his own, waiting for his friends and his drugs. Maybe doesn’t evoke a sense of calm, but you can’t have everything…

  50. I finally succumbed and looked up wistful in the dictionary.

    The Merriam-Webster describes it as:

    “full of yearning or desire tinged with melancholy

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wistful

    This blog entry hit the nail on the head.

    “It’s one of those words where dictionaries seem to cough, shuffle their feet and try to change the subject.”

    https://blog.inkyfool.com/2011/03/wistful-and-wist.html

    Radka Toneff’s version of This Jimmy Webb standard certainly belongs here.

    I didn’t know until this morning that Webb took the title from a sci fi novel by Robert A. Heinlein.

    https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/16690.The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

    Canadians do melancholic yearning rather well…….

    No mention yet of Father John Wisty?

    • Another beautiful classical piece! We’ve had some splendid variety on this thread, I was listening to m playlist this afternoon and Mrs KFD was very taken by Spiegel im spiegel.

      But honestly. If we want yearning and desire served with a large dollop of regret, can we do better than the dinnertime anguish of John Shuttleworth?

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