No Monday is more Mondayish than the first Monday after the New Year.
After two weeks of spending money and eating like the world was coming to an end, reality comes back with its twin weapons of guilt and responsibility. As your annual Champagne hangover recedes into the rearview mirror, a long, holiday-less section of winter stretches out towards the horizon.
It’s the kind of Monday that you can’t get through with only one song. So I’m offering you two versions of the same song today, just in case you need them.
Version 1: “Worlds to Run (VIP Dub)” by Kenny Segal
Remove the vocals from most rap songs, and you’re often left with a catchy but bare-sounding instrumental that doesn’t have the depth to deliver its own message. But producer Kenny Segal’s instrumental is mournful, evocative, and beautifully textured.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The opening. Emerging from the sound of crickets, the acoustic guitar loop that is present for most of the song has an enigmatic, unfinished quality to it that is hard to pin down. More on that later.
2. The layers. There’s a lot going on here, and you can hear the story behind some of the instrumentation on this episode of Song Exploder.
3. The horns. They come in for the first time at 1.50, and their smooth harmonies contrast the grittiness of the track perfectly.
Recommended listening activity:
Taking down the Christmas decorations.
Version 2: “Worlds to Run” by Busdriver feat. Milo and Anderson .Paak
Because the instrumental was the first version I heard, it took a while for me to really get into this iteration, but the three vocalists, in their own ways, manage to capture and magnify the emotion of Kenny Segal’s backing track.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. As the track begins, that acoustic guitar sample mentioned above is given a bit of context. Rather than starting as a two-beat loop, we hear it in its original form: as an eight-beat descending guitar lick. The unfinished quality of the sample is because we are hearing only beats five and six. This, for me, is sampling at its best: taking an unlikely snippet from the middle of a musical phrase, nullifying its original key signature, and turning it into the basis for a song.
2. The lyrics capture a candor that is rare in a genre that tends to favour toughness over vulnerability. Milo’s opening verse paints a picture of him “crying in his underwear,” before mentioning that he forgot to change his laundry over. This is a lyricist I can relate to.
3. Anderson .Paak’s crooning in the chorus sets the stage for some intricate rhyming on Busdriver’s verse, in which he often rhymes full lines: “Every song responds to a threat / Every laundered dollar is wet / But at my mom’s I can saw on torn breath / At my mom’s I can ponder the depth.
Recommended listening activity:
Taking down the Christmas decorations. While crying in your underwear.