Track #14: "A Forest" by The Cure (1980)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where with each post we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we approach the 1980s through examinations of Heavy Metal and Indie music.

Aaron: Seventeen Seconds, The Cure’s second album, was released in April of 1980. It’s safe to say that I had no clue about the album’s release or the band itself. Looking back, I’d like to think my favorite song of 1980 was AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” but if I’m honest it was probably something like “Take it on the Run” by REO Speedwagon. What can I say, I was young! Nobody I knew listened to The Cure in 1980, none of my friends knew who they were. And it’s pretty likely that very few people in the US knew the band. In the UK, while the band’s early releases couldn’t be considered break-out smashes, the albums did fairly well in the swirling, heady post-punk days when the likes of Goth, New Wave, and New Romantic hadn’t yet ossified into generic convention. Seventeen Seconds reached number 20 on the UK album charts.

It might be worth pointing out that April of 1980 was really only barely the 1980s – so many signifiers of the decade had yet to fall into place. In the US Ronald Reagan was not yet president and in the UK Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for under a year. E.T. was still two years away, Top Gun six, and MTV wouldn’t debut until the following summer. Pacman was still six months from landing on US shores, and the world had two and a half years to wait for Thriller.

Into this era of transition, The Cure released their second album, approximately a year after their debut, Three Imaginary Boys (which would be renamed Boys Don’t Cry for its US release in early 1980). Seventeen Seconds is often considered the first of The Cure’s “goth” albums – a label front man Robert Smith regularly resists. While the album features drones, spooky sound effects, and some lyrics heavy on gloom and sadness, all hallmarks of goth, it also includes elements of ambient music, shoe gaze, and a sort of Romanticism evoked by Smith’s highly expressive voice.


We've posted the above rather than the original video (which can be found here) because it includes the entirety of the song.

Had I heard this entry’s track for discussion, “A Forest,” in 1980, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have known what to think of it – stupid? boring? – I don’t know. Certainly not for me. Yet listening to it now, one can hear how incredibly influential the sound of early Cure music would become to indie bands from the 1980s and beyond.

Lew, listening to the song in its historical context, it sounds to me like something almost completely new. What do you think? Does “A Forest” sound distinctly ‘80s to you? Can you hear the music to come, or does the song still have a 1970s vibe to it?

Metal v. Indie in the 1980s: Introduction pt 2

Welcome to Track Chatter, an occasional blog where two long-time friends and music lovers geek out about songs. With each entry we choose one track to discuss in depth, from a variety of angles. This entry is part of an introduction to a new series looking at Heavy Metal and Indie songs from the 1980s.

In the first part of the Introduction, we spent some discussing our own thoughts about the '80s - both as we experienced the decade and also through the lenses of history and nostalgia. In this part, we'll talk (a bit) more specifically about the upcoming series and the types of songs we'll be chatting about.

We ended the previous post with Aaron posing three broad categories of pop music from the '80s as something of a loose framework for thinking about how the decade's songs have been treated by history. Lew takes it up from there . . .

Lew: I think your groupings capture what we’ve been discussing quite well. As you say, it might be that one could debate which songs and artists are included in each category, but I think the categories themselves are strong, and probably could be relevant when discussing any decade of music. I also agree with your suggestion that we keep these categories in mind as our discussion moves forward. So, with that in mind, I think we’re in a great place to introduce exactly what we’ve got planned for this project.

We’ve been discussing our experiences with music during the ‘80s (and of the ‘80s), and we’ve both been fairly vocal about what music speaks to us best from the decade, so I don’t think it will be a big surprise that we’re going to be talking metal and indie. They’re two genres that were relatively under the radar at the beginning of the decade (more so in the case of indie, I guess), and enjoyed quite a bit of success in one way or another by the end. It’s going to be interesting to track the evolution of each genre from an internal perspective, as well as the cultural significance that each of them developed throughout the ‘80s. Each of us will select five tracks for discussion, and we’ll roll them out, one at a time. It will be similar to The Beatles project in that sense, except that the artist we’re discussing will change for each entry. Aaron, do you want to say anything about the process that you’ll be using to select your tracks?

Metal v. Indie in the 1980s: Introduction pt 1

Aaron: Welcome to Track Chatter, an occasional blog where two long-time friends and music lovers geek out about songs. With each entry, we choose one track to talk about, from a variety of angles – lyrics, musical style, structure, production, and so on. We’ve recently wrapped up a project in which we discussed one song from each of The Beatles' UK studio releases.

With our new series, we thought we’d go in a slightly different direction – rather than pick one specific artist or band, we’re going to talk about songs from a particular decade: the 1980s. Yes, that overcooked oldie is coming up again. But our hope is that the spin we’re going to put on the discussion will lend it a relevance that a lot of more nostalgic appreciations of the decade don’t always convey. We’ll see.

But before we layout the ground rules of this series – the limitations we’ve imposed on ourselves, if you will – perhaps it’s worth having a chat about the decade in general. Lew, is there anything that can be said about ‘80s music that hasn’t been said already, and maybe hundreds of times?

Lew: You know, my depth of knowledge as regards critical writing on the music of the ‘80s is probably not that deep, so I’m not sure if my perspective is original or not. But, I guess there are a couple of things about the ‘80s as a decade of music that are immediately significant to me. 



First, and probably most obviously, the ‘80s was the decade in which the forms of popular music, which generally still exist and populate the landscape of pop music today, came to full prominence. For example, prior to ‘80s the differentiation between what could be called heavy metal and what would be interpreted as hard rock was not an especially meaningful distinction, with your Thin Lizzies and Foghats occupying a place not greatly removed from Deep Purple or even early Judas Priest. By contrast, by the time Metallica released Kill ‘Em All in 1983, it was pretty obvious that they were doing something quite different from AC/DC. Equally as important, the ‘80s is the first decade in which you start seeing hip-hop emerge as the massive artistic/social/commercial phenomenon that it has been for the last two decades (at least). Those are two strong examples, but one could discuss punk, indie or dance pop and I think the idea that we see those forms evolve to something fairly close to their current iteration during the ‘80s is still apt.

The Beatles - Some Final Thoughts

Welcome to Track Chatter, where we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we reconsider songs by The Beatles. Can anything new be said about this band or its music? Have a look below and let us know what you think.

Aaron: Well, Lew, we’ve done it. It took longer than I thought it would. Our first post on The Beatles came almost exactly two years ago, and since then we’ve written about sixteen Beatles tracks. Did you think it would take that long?

Lew: I definitely did not expect or plan for it to take this long! There’s a John Lennon quote (which you may know) that goes, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” – seems pretty appropriate here. I have to admit, I’m feeling a little conflicted now that we’re actually finishing it. I was looking forward to moving on to other topics, but I also feel weirdly like I’m going to miss talking about The Beatles. Maybe this is a loaded question, but how do you feel about seeing the end of this project?

Aaron: I’m a bit conflicted as well. When we first started the project, I sort of thought we’d burn through it in a few months, maybe 6 to 8 or so, and I was really excited. And while we were working on those first few entries, I got a real rush going back and listening to those older albums in full – it had been along time since I’d listened to all of Please Please Me or A Hard Day’s Night, for example – and in most cases, I was listening to the mono re-masters. That meant that in addition to hearing a lot of the songs again for the first time, I was hearing them in ways I hadn’t before, which was incredibly exciting. I think that sense of excitement comes out in those early entries in the way we write about something like the sound of Paul’s bass or the harmonies.

But as time passed and “life happened,” I sort of started to feel like perhaps we’d been a bit too ambitious. So I got worried we’d never finish and I found myself sort of wishing we’d started with a smaller project so that the pressure to do it all wouldn’t have seemed so immense.

However, now that it’s coming to an end, I do feel a bit wistful. I’ve so enjoyed the intensity of listening to each of these albums in preparation for each entry that I’ll be sad to see that go. However, I really do feel like my appreciation for The Beatles has not only intensified, but also that it’s a lot more grounded now. In that sense, I’m really excited about the conversations we’ve had.

How about you? Did the project change the way you listen to the band at all?

Track #13: "I've Got a Feeling" Let It Be (1970)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we reconsider songs by The Beatles. Can anything new be said about this band or its music? Have a look below and let us know what you think.

Lew: It’s rare to hear the Beatles’ final album, Let It Be, discussed without an accompanying discussion of the famously difficult sessions that went into recording the album, or the personal conflicts that ensued and ultimately led to the break-up of the band. As a historical component of the Beatles’ eventual dissolution, it makes sense to view the finished album, and the sessions that created it (as detailed in the movie of the same name) as one artifact. That said, it’s unlikely that the album gets a fair shake when situated against the arguments of whether Paul or John was right, or whether Yoko really broke up the band. The truth is that it’s an interesting album on its own merits, and might have indicated a new creative period for the band if they had continued. Paul’s idea of going back to basics had yielded results that weren’t as predictable as one might expect. Rather than an obvious return to the songwriting style of Beatles For Sale or Help!, Let It Be filters a large part of its simplified approach through the more ambitious work of their later output – whether in a literal or reactionary sense – striking a balance between less complex arrangements and charting new territory (“One After 909” notwithstanding) compositionally.

“I’ve Got a Feeling” marries simplicity and complexity as well as any other song on Let It Be. On one hand, the musical structure is fairly basic, and the arrangement is pretty straightforward. At the same time, the song itself is a marriage between two song fragments, written by McCartney and Lennon, respectively. It’s a move that recalls the multi-part suite at the end of Abbey Road, but on a more modest scale, and I would say in a more organic way. I have to admit that it never occurred to me that the two sections of the song originated separately until I did some reading to prepare for discussing it here, which I think speaks to how well McCartney and Lennon were able to work together, even at this late date.

Aaron, there’s a lot worth discussing in “I’ve Got a Feeling,” but I guess I’m interested in starting with how you see it fitting into The Beatles’ work as a whole. Do you think it’s a new approach, or would you say that it fits in somewhere in the songs that precede it?