The difference between someone like Kathleen Edwards and the swaths of mainstream Canadian artists is that we can garner a sense that Edwards (and those like her) are in fact Canadian — they sing about aspects of our culture that only we’d understand, and, unlike the Biebs and Twains and Dions, they aren’t going to remove those aspects in a calculated way for across-the-border appeal.  They keep in the snow and Gretzky and french words, or, to put it more accurately, they’re just singing about those things, willingly or unconsciously, because they are who they are.  “I’m moving to America / It’s an empty threat” is a rejection of an attempt at US success, just as it is, at the same time, a very Canadian statement –  it carries a sentiment only Canadians would understand.  This is what the best Canadiana does, it keeps us on the inside of a joke or a feeling.  We love it because other people won’t get it, because it’s easy to feel and hard to explain.

What I love about this song is the shift of volume and vocal delivery between the choruses and verses. It’s an important shift, when it happens, because it illustrates so clearly how we sometimes feel during breakups, or how we feel when a past breakup is brought back into our minds. Each verse begins with an expository, analytical approach to the split, telling us the specifics of why it didn’t work, but it’s as though this approach can only work for so long for each singer — they become frustrated and annoyed in their remembrance of those times, which causes them to break out into the throat-raw chorus, yelling out more emotionally-driven phrases like “I don’t even need your love” — a very childish “so there!” kind of statement. They’re far enough apart, now, to not feel so much, but there’s still a lot left over — a lot of healing to be done.

Here, John Darnielle writes the anti-”Video Games.” We’re shown a darker side of fame, and the traps that lie before performers and entertainers who suffer from the whims of audience and culture. Whether the speaker of the song is Minnelli, reflecting on her own life and career, or an actor who came to LA to become famous, or, if you want, Lana Del Rey herself — the story’s the same. How can you escape from yourself when the hounds of fame have ensnared you, when your every move is watched, when you could never have predicted the rapid, rabid swings of hype? Can you “turn back, turn back” and “find someone to tell your secrets to”? Or has the whole game spilled everything you are into the public eye?

“Liza Minnelli Forever” is also, at its core, a rewrite of “Hotel California.” Aside from the repeated line “I am never ever going to get away from this place,” Darnielle cleverly conjures up “Hotel” with the most quotable line of All Eternals Deck: “Anyone here mentions ‘Hotel California’ dies before the first line clears his lips.” We’re not sure if the speaker hates “Hotel” because of its subject matter (it is, after all, a song about the trappings of Hollywood and fame), or because it is perhaps the best — and certainly the most ironic — example of fame overwhelming an artist. The song became so insanely big that it has reduced the Eagles to being one-hit-wonders, or worse: how many people even know that “Hotel California” is by the Eagles anymore?

More than any of this though, “Liza Minnelli Forever” is simply another exceptional example of Darnielle presenting to us a character of depth and feeling, and doing so in just a few words. This a rare gift.

One can’t help but read behind the text of “Video Games” and see Lana Del Rey, the figure we’re now all aware of, as someone who was dying to become famous — to bask in the spotlight of LA cool.  The chorus tells us so, if we decide to see it that way:  everything she does is for her audience, and the world is only worth living if someone (us) loves her.  She’s after making a song that embodies the air of fame and celebrity that swam along the Hollywood streets of the past, the one occupied by Elvis and James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and Sinatra, and the one that we look back on with a weird kind of fondness — it was more romantic, more sensual and a hell of a lot more fun than today.  More than that, though, she’s attempting to make us see her as a figure from that period and associate her with it. She wants to capture the cool from then and smear it all over herself, so when we see her we see it, and vice-versa. And, well, it kinda worked. Lana got was she was after — the hype, the celebrity, the SNL appearance before the release of her debut album. But celebrity and hype are going to do what they do, in 2012 especially, and so now she’s being dragged through the gutter and left to die as a one-hit (okay, maybe two-hit) wonder.  She slipped up; or, alternatively, we were going to pull her down regardless for being so good once.

Yet whatever we say now and whatever happens to Lana Del Rey, her big track will always have a magic to it, a flair that few songs do. As I said before: it worked. It’s a great coming-together of elements: the timbre of Del Rey’s voice, delivered like an actress imitating actresses; the way “pull up in your fast car, whistling my name” invokes James Dean, and “I heard that you like the bad girls, honey” sounds like an actual 50s movie quote; the rising strings of the chorus, sad and woozy and just a touch haunted, like they were released from a time-capsule; the rustling of chimes here and there.  All of it combines to create a nostalgia for the kind of Hollywood that Hollywood itself cultivated in its films in the 50s, and all of it works so well that cringe-worthy lines like “I say you da bestest” sound romantic and inspired.  It’s an achievement all its own.

This is the finest major-key pop one-two punch of the year, of years maybe, which makes it bizarre to me that these songs in particular and Patrick Wolf in general aren’t smothering out lesser artists on the radio, in car commercials, movie trailers, etc. That he didn’t with previous efforts made sense; in the past his music was much more radical in sound and content. There were the heavy beats, the darkness-over-everything ballads, and a lyrical focus on sexual ambiguity, pedophiles, werewolves, magic realism and whatever. But when songs on the same album as “The City” and “House” feature platitudes about same-sex marriage being “an okay thing” and carrying a lover over the threshold, and when “The City” and “House” themselves are, at their core, sappy love songs, I just have to wonder. How do people not know about this guy by now? Isn’t this the kind of shit that makes people go crazy — like “Viva La Vida” or “I’m Yours”? Lupercalia is the Patrick Wolf album built for the masses — so safe in its lyrics, so gorgeous in its musical output, so swooning with romance and optimism — I wonder why people who dig Katy Perry or Coldplay or Adele haven’t heard this or liked it.

This is the Lekman that I love, that I will always love, doing that thing that I love him for, that thing he does in “Postcards To Nina” and “A Higher Power” and a bunch of his other great songs. “Waiting For Kirsten” begins and is embodied by a hilarious, whimsical conceit/storyline (stalking actress Kirsten Dunst while she’s in Sweden filming Melancholia), but, by some magical Lekman judo that I can’t figure out, the song morphs into a rumination on (and maybe a resignation of) the changing social/political landscape of Sweden. There’s a masterful combination of laugh-out-loud funny and intensely serious here; it’s clear that Lekman can do this kind of turn better than anyone else.

Rather than dictate or explain the mysteries within ourselves and about our universe, the central, paired questions of this song –“What is this thing called love?” and “What is this thing above?” (which could be read either as God or the universe) — are answered with an explosion of pleasure-in-sound, as though all the best parts of life and living were suddenly released from the hollow centres of guitars and drums and amplifiers. And that’s the point; there’s joy and beauty in mystery and the unknown, and there are certain things that no amount of explaining away can hinder, obstruct, or alter. Even though we may find answers to why we fall in love, why we are who we are, or why the universe is here, that knowledge still won’t ever take the feeling out of a first kiss, or make mundane the marvels of the night sky.

Make rock song over distorted guitars.  Make vocals muffled and raw.  Add the ungodly scream of hellspawn from an electronic underworld.  Fever dreaming.

I’ll just leave this here.

Colin Meloy’s project here is to transfer the joyful, full-of-life aromas and images of June on Springville Hill onto the love the speaker has for his lover.  But, of course, it’s not known whether the temperate June setting of this song is influencing the speaker’s love, or whether the love he feels is influencing his experience with his surroundings.  Is it his head, cloudy with emotions, making the setting more vibrant, more alive?  Or has this gorgeous place made him fall in love?  The recursive loop between setting and feeling is magnifying, so much so that I feel the same worry of the speaker at the end of the song — will we long for these past places we loved so much in a future when we can’t return to them?  And is the difficulty returning to the place only, or a combination of place and experience?