Back to back days--you'd think I'm trying to catch up (at least this one's only five days late)....
It's not surprising, given my penchant for a good pop tune, that the best pop song on a great album would eventually come to the fore. This week's tune spent weeks dancing around in my head, with me studying the lyric sheet daily to remember every word, and as I did my due diligence this week and listened to it again and again in prep for this post...it was every bit as good as I remembered it.
As with last week, I've written a post about Hozier before, in Vol. CCCXCI. Unlike last week, though, Hozier does have at least a little news in the interim, as he released his third full-length LP in 2023, a couple of EPS, and was fortunate enough to have his first number one single on the Billboard Hot 100. He has remained active in social issues, and released a single, "Swan Upon Leda" which was a call for reproductive rights and women's empowerment. Sadly, as the loss of Vice-President Harris showed us, we have a long way to go for those two goals here in America.
"Jackie and Wilson" was the third song on his rather eponymously entitled debut album, Hozier. Though it was probably the best top forty oriented song on the album, it was not released as a single. I already covered the album's chart trifecta in the earlier post.
Fun Fact: The link (below) to the lyrics has a video wherein Hozier explains the process behind creating this week's tune. Not surprisingly, he notes Jackie Wilson as a big influence of his, even going so far as to say that he thought Elvis Presley was the white Jackie Wilson and not the other way around.
In the video I just mentioned, Hozier said the idea behind "Jackie and Wilson" was simply to make a song that was fun--and he succeeded magnificently. The song tells the tale of a man sitting in a bar, tired and lonely, who spots a woman and begins a fantasy of their adventurous life together replete with their kids Jackie and Wilson. Eventually she moves on, and he's left to wait for another woman to begin another fantasy. Hozier has a gift for the written word ("I need to be youthfully felt 'cause, God, I never felt young"), and his blue-eyed soul vocals are to die for. Not to mention the pulsating guitar and drums mimicking time? heartbeats? through the stanzas which segue into the cotton candy sweet chorus. And like the fantasy, the song ends as abruptly as the fantasy began. Just a wonderful song, another slice of truck stop pie on the Pop Music Highway.
Lyric Sheet: "Happy to lie back, watch it burn and rust/We tried the world, good God it wasn't for us..."
Enjoy:
Fuck Donald Trump
Peace,
emaycee
