The Wily Filipino

Your New Favorite Song.

This has been sitting on my server for a while, and it's time I posted a link to it. I know very little about the singer Bic Runga, except that she's from New Zealand, she's part Chinese and part Maori, and one of her earlier songs ended up on the American Pie soundtrack. (I can't imagine it fit very well with the movie.) Her 2003 album Beautiful Collision is full of smoky, sharply-written, bittersweet pop songs, anchored by Runga's creamy vocals. "Creamy" sounds a little rude, except that it describes the soft caress of her voice quite well.

The song featured here, "The Be All and End All," is not representative of the album. It's a country song, for starters, but the arrangement gives her lyrics -- on that sweet, scary moment before the plunge -- a slightly ironic edge:

Flogging a rocking horse, getting nowhere
We are a pair to behold
You like a funeral me like a fair
Nobody cares for the show

But the real beauty of the song comes toward the end, after the earlier, gentle tussle of indecision, when the verse-chorus-verse structure shifts to a bridge:

I've had love come to nothing before
But it's all right, it's all right
I've welcomed it in and I've shown it the door
But it's all right, it's all right

And then the song simply ends, on that graceful note of both lyrical and structural hesitation (or surrender?), with Neil Finn's piano playing an entirely new melody.

Hear it. (3.2 mb)

Posted by the wily filipino at May 10, 2004 10:58 AM