Perfect Songs

I love the movie The Princess Bride.  There's something about it; the funny parts are funny, but it's not totally a comedy; the romantic parts are romantic, but it's not a romance.  It's serious and sweet and way funnier than most straight forward comedies.  But more interestingly to me, there's literally nothing in it that (to me) doesn't work.  There is nothing extraneous in the movie - it's like a finely tuned machine.  For this reason, I've said (to people who will listen) that The Princess Bride is a perfect movie.

I feel the same way about the song "New Slang" by the Shins.  The song is perfect - the melody is haunting, the lyrics brilliant, but not overwrought, the two guitar solos just exquisite, and everything else - it's perfect.  When I first heard the song, I thought that the intro sounded like a Raffi song.  The folky guitars were there, after all.

Few bands ever get to write a song as good as "New Slang" and almost never get to do it twice.  The Shins are a terrific band without "New Slang" - you almost feel sorry for them, having everything they do compared to something they can't possibly match.  When I saw them live, they seemed to understand this, and resent it a little.  They took it out on the song, trying to bring it down from it's pedestal a little.  The almost reverential tempo was played faster, and looser.  The singing was a little ragged, and the phrasing tried to break free of the song a little bit.

William Goldman never wrote another book as good as The Princess Bride and knew it.  This kind of thing actually happens all the time.  It's more than the one-hit wonder thing.  Ben Folds is no one-hit wonder, but he'll never top "Brick."  It took a cover version, but Leonard Cohen finally got the "Hallelujah" he deserved. 

Sometimes, rock musicians write hymns, it seems.