Sing With Me, If Just For Today: 5 Songs With High Profile Back Up Singers

This week's songs are from Steve Winwood, Dijon, the Dodos, Kevin Morby, and Silver Jews

RIP Neil Sedaka - Connie Francis - “Fallin’”

Among the Brill Building songwriting cohort of Neil Diamond, Gerry Goffin and Carole Kane, Burt Bacharach, and Doc Pomus, Neil Sedaka made his mark in the post Doo-Wop, pre-Beatles window of teen pop, writing and performing simple pop songs about longing and chaste love. In the funhouse mirror of American music, I’ve seen unsubstantiated claims that Darby Crash of the Germs called Sedaka “the real Godfather of punk” with his simple chords and straight-ahead lyrics—a rumor I’m happy enough to keep alive. In that vein, here is Connie Francis performing Sedaka and Howard Greenfield’s “Fallin’” which sounds like everything the Cramps ever did but 30 years ahead of time. It’s that cool.

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I’d recently heard about Bright Eyes doing a few shows to mark the anniversary of the dual release of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash/Digital Urn. So I took the opportunity to spend some time with them. It was a bit of a time warp, given I have them so linked to a time, place, and even a season. However, checking the dates I realize the wet and gray Bloomington, Indiana in my mind is a late winter/early spring and not autumn. It’s funny how the mind plays tricks like that.

I most often link of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning anytime I hear Emmylou Harris. Her background vocals are on just three of the albums songs. But they are so impactful and haunting I can hear her voice just looking at the cover.

However, I had a funny realization as I listened to the opening track: “…is that Jim James singing harmonies?” And yes, yes it is.

Sometimes, a pretty high-profile artist will drop into a session and add some backing vocals or a splash of shine into the mix.

Here are 5 songs with some high profile singers in the background.

“I think there is a spiritual component, but on a more simple, basic level it’s just that music, I feel, should be to raise people’s spirits rather than dampen them. That’s really all it is. It’s not any more complicated than that. I’m not trying to indoctrinate people who listen to me with any kind of idea or anything; one of the basic requirements of music is just to uplift people’s spirits, if possible.” - Steve Winwood

Steve Winwood - “Back in the High Life Again”

After suffering a stomach infection that nearly killed him in the early 70s, and kept him off the road, Steve Winwood found a more spiritual perspective that would inform his later work, resulting in a career resurgence as a solo performer in the 1980s. If there is a throughline to this period, it is a positivity and peace, on display in “Back in the High Life Again.” The song is a mental vacation. It asks nothing of the listener but to relax, feel gratitude for what you have, and find assurance that any setbacks are temporary.

For Winwood, crafting songs is about the instrumentation and arrangement, so he co-wrote “Back in the High Life Again” with lyricist Will Jennings with whom he also wrote “The Finer Things” and “Higher Love”—all expressions of that new lease on life—and many others in the 80s. Jennings won 2 Oscars for his lyrics on “Up Where We Belong” and “My Heart Will Go On,” so he’s clearly got a good handle on getting some words on the page. Joining Winwood on some understated harmonies is James Taylor, which maybe explains why it’s such a warm and welcoming chorus. It’s a welcome hug and a pat on the back.

“I wanted my music to be positively embarrassing to play in public. There’s a passivity that’s built into music right now. I was like, ‘I refuse for my music to be viable as a background thing.’ I want it to be embarrassing. I wanted, initially, for the volumes to fluctuate pretty intensely, so that you would have to constantly turn it up or turn it down.” - Dijon Duenas

Dijon - “HIGHER”

A high-profile collaborator in his own right, writing with Mk.gee and Justin Bieber, Dijon takes an approach much like his friend and collaborator Justin Vernon: he brings in an eclectic range of absolute ringers for his own work—Mk.gee, Sam Wilkes, Pino Palladino, Jenn Wasner.

While at Vernon’s April Base studio recording Bon Iver’s “Day One,” Dijon felt inspired and cut “HIGHER!” The two songs share a gospel-tinged euphoric joy and three songwriters (Dijon, Vernon, and Wasner, among others). While Dijon and Wasner (as Flock of Dimes) are featured on “Day One,” Wasner on bass and Vernon on “additional vocals” are listed in the credits for “HIGHER!”

I’m not sure where in the R&B timeline coolness and swagger became a main factor, but Dijon brings a vulnerability and sincerity to his music that reminds me of Marvin Gaye. Frank Ocean also does too, but Dijon and Gaye somehow still know how to keep a party atmosphere while doing it. On “HIGHER!”

Something else that stands out is in singing about his wife, Dijon throws in the line

“I love it when you tie my ties, tie around my neck
And double love it when you're all dolled up”

It’s a real shorthand symbol of intimacy that reminds me of the National using the same device to a similar effect in the great “Apartment Story”

Be still for a second while I try and try to pin your flowers on
Can you carry my drink, I have everything else
I can tie my tie all by myself
I'm getting tied, I'm forgetting why

“She was really happy when I came up to her, and I was so nervous about asking her. But finally, at the end of the tour…after the set she was like ‘What are you doing this summer?’ and I said we’re recording and asked her what she was doing. She’s like, ‘Nothing,’ so I asked…it just sort of happened” - Meric Long

the Dodos - “Sleep”

Like Emmylou Harris, Neko Case has a notably strong solo career, but has no qualms about joining in as a harmonizer, as she does as a member of the New Pornographers. And god bless them both for it, it adds such a rich texture to the songs.

But texture is not something the Dodos are lacking. The duo creates a whirlwind of a racket, with propulsive, polyrhythmic drums that force momentum over otherwise patient singer-songwriter guitar and vocals, at its best in “Don’t Stop.” The Dodos had been touring with the New Pornographers and Neko Case had joined them on stage a number of times, making it an easy invitation when they were recording 2011’s No Color, where she appears on a handful of songs. Case’s voice is featured most prominently on “Don’t Try to Hide It,” but “Sleep” offers more of the manic pace and layers of texture they do so well. And it’s a perfect example of why so many people look back so fondly on Late-Aughts Indie Rock.

“A song very much about being in love and circling the globe around your person…That, and, the sheer wear and tear one experiences after weeks of traveling on planes, trains, and automobiles. That special brand of vertigo brought on by coming home where everything is seemingly the same and not the same all at once - a touring musicians story, as old as the hills.” - Kevin Morby

Kevin Morby - “Javelin”

This song was released 2 weeks ago and it hasn’t left my head since I first heard it. As Morby sings of the jet-setting life of a touring musician of a javelin darting through the air, left unspoken is that a javelin ultimately strikes a spot in the ground, and there is a wobble of uncertainty and boredom that strikes when he lands at home. In his comments introducing the song, Morby mentions the song started as a slower, sadder version. But the uplift of a faster tempo are part of its charm. The song really takes off when Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso) enters. The layers of Meath’s voice create a sweeping grandeur—the open skies of “Middle America,” the expansiveness of his longing—that transforms an otherwise narrow milieu into something epic.

“I’m thinking of records with ‘Play Loud’ or ‘meant to be played loud’ somewhere on the artwork. It always seemed a tinge futile. My feeling was always something like: ‘No, I will not play you loud.’ I could print ‘Absorb Intently for Long Time Before Re-selling’ on my products, but I’m afraid of pushing others around.” - David Berman

Silver Jews - “The Wild Kindness”

I find the above quote particularly funny, because I’ve had that exact experience with his work. It takes a number of listens to really sink in and be understood. It’s a droll, oblique, and shaggy at times. Berman’s work as Purple Mountains broke the rest of his music wide open. Another way into Silver Jews is Stephen Malkmus, a part-time member who also makes droll, oblique, and shaggy-at-times music. Malkmus co-wrote a number of songs on American Water and sings lead on “Federal Dust.” But “The Wild Kindness” finds Berman at his most defiant and nearly anthemic—for him anyway. The harmonies from Malkmus, who co-wrote the song, bring out an aching swirl of melancholy and hope. Maybe you’ll find yourself like me, lost in thought trying to figure out what exactly it is to “shine out in the wild kindness,” other than just reveling in a beautiful mix of words, so you turn the song back to the start, if just to take in the kick-ass organ sound at the start.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy listening.