music moots with Hey Rel ("Poetry Man" by Phoebe Snow)

We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.

Today's recommender is singer-songwriter Ariel Hirschhorn, who records as Hey Rel in Providence, Rhode Island. Hey Rel just put out their debut EP called Big Try earlier this month. It's a warm, hook-y rock album that teeters at a particular emotional precipice: Should I Do The Thing I Want to Do? Desire and action exist at opposite ends of the see-saw, but they don't have to be enemies. Sometimes it's delicious to balance at the moment just before something happens. Rel asks questions throughout the EP that might not get answers—do you feel real? did you take my advice? do I want too much?—but the asking puts the energy out there, and creates a wonderful portal of possibility.

Big Try, by Hey Rel

5 track album

Hey RelHey Rel

Also the bass parts on this EP (played by Catherine Noa Ashley) are so choice, "Margery" and "Blue Hour American Dream" in particular. A good bass line is such a simple and effective upgrade. At least for this bass-oriented individual, a good bass line shows you care.

Rel recommended me a song by Phoebe Snow: "Poetry Man." I have never listened to this song before and was excited to see it was released in 1974. I need to listen to more music from the 1970s.

I just read the novel How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti, and it contains a lot of short numbered passages, which I thought was cool, so I will respond to this with a similarly styled post:

1. I don't know what they were putting in the water in the 1970s to get the vibrato that singers had at that time. You could time a watch to Phoebe Snow's vibrato.
2. Great miniaturized percussion in this. So many little shakies and chimes. Feels like a small crew of elves did the backing instruments.
3. "Surprise, this romantic song is actually about sleeping with a married man" is a wonderful song theme. My favorite version of this is obviously "Does He Love You?" by Rilo Kiley. Sound off in the comments with your favorite Surprise Infidelity song.
4. Today if you wrote a song about a man and you called him The Poetry Man, it would definitely not be a nice song. Sarcastic references to Leonard Cohen on recent records by Sabrina Carpenter and boygenius suggest a foundational unfriendliness toward men with poetic tendencies.
5. Phoebe, on the other hand, might be a little cheeky with her repeated refrain of You're the Poetry Man but she isn't turning this guy down. He activates her full spectrum of crush potential: giggling teen, sultry vamp, and of course, wistful singer-songwriter watching him leave to go see his wife.
6. This live version from the year I was born is awesome. Phoebe wears triangular earrings and a cropped curly hairdo. The backing band uses a light touch of synthesizer that reveals the late '80s time period in a classy way. Her voice is just as graceful as it was 15 years prior when the song came out.
7. This song reached number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was part of Phoebe Snow's debut album, and that album was so successful that she was nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys. Doesn't it blow your mind to think of the trajectory of popular music over time? I felt this too when I watched A Complete Unknown—the idea of a traditional genre like folk also being a zesty trend.
8. "Poetry Man" is, to my ear, a sophisticated song, and I feel like popular culture prized sophistication in the 1970s and 1980s in a way that has since fallen off. It's difficult to project genuine sophistication. Nowadays, it is worn more as a costume than embraced as a way of life. (Lots of "mob wife" outfit of the days, not a lot of real mob wives out there.) Being "sophisticated" might be as difficult as being "cool." Sophistication requires patience that is not rewarded by today's velocity of trends. You kind of have to step off the treadmill to even get started.
9. Part of the reason the song feels sophisticated is musical, and part of the reason it feels sophisticated is because of the elegant emotional reaction Phoebe has to this love affair. It hasn't curdled for her yet. She's not looking for revenge. Maybe she's embracing this natural distance between her and her married lover. It's a source of tension, and an escape route. She's free to move about the cabin.
10. Lastly, dig this Japanese 7" of the single. Look at this typography. The characters in the middle of the O spell "poet" according to the translation scan thing I did on my phone.

Thank you Rel! Listen to Big Try and check out their website.

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