Bonus Tracks // Pity Served Three Ways
Song Diary #2: 'Isn't It A Pity?' Covers I Listened to This Week
Welcome to the second-ever ‘Tracks on Tracks DIARY,’ an unpredictably recurring feature in which someone shares some of what they’ve been listening to lately while … Doing a Thing. While cooking. While running. While writing. Et cetera. Focusing — just like Tracks essays — on how music and life intertwine. Just in a more bite-sized format.
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In last week’s diary I wrote about a couple of songs my kids and I have been listening to on the drive to school. Today I’ve written about some songs I listened to while … editing T.M. Brown’s recent Tracks essay on Nina Simone’s cover of George Harrison’s “Isn’t It A Pity?”
Spoiler alert: all the songs are different versions of “Isn’t It A Pity?”
ToT Diary #002: Isn’t It A Pities?
I usually have a hard time writing with music on— except for when I’m writing about music. Then I sometimes throw on the artist or genre I’m writing about while I type, in hopes of letting the world on the screen and the world in the speakers bleed into each other a bit.
Wednesday’s Tracks essay was about writer T.M. Brown’s experiences with two versions of “Isn’t It A Pity?” — the George Harrison original and the Nina Simone cover.
While editing it, I found myself listening to lots of other versions of the song. Including:
George Harrison: ‘Isn’t It A Pity?’ (Demo Version)
As much as I admire George Harrison as a songwriter and guitarist, I rarely listen to his solo material. This mostly comes down to the production choices: his songs often feel (to my taste) sort of swamped by their big arrangements and weirdly subdued mixes, which are somehow echoey and flat at the same time. I have no inherent objection to big arrangements and echoey mixes (or even flat ones!), but often with Harrison they seem less like tools being productively leveraged and more like defense mechanisms. I can’t help wondering about the influence of Lennon and McCartney here. Sure, they probably taught Harrison a lot about songwriting. But it’s not implausible to me that the massive shadow of their famous talent also made him more self-conscious than he had to be, and sent him looking for protective armor.1 In this bare-bones demo the armor hasn’t really been built yet. We’re right up against the core of the song — the place where its despair and optimism meet and meld — and it’s obviously more than enough on its own. ✹
Billy Preston, Eric Clapton, et al: ‘Isn’t It A Pity?’ (Live)
On the original album version, the big arrangement — one of Harrison's biggest — is balanced out by his warbly voice. In this live version, recorded at a Harrison tribute concert, Eric Clapton and Billy Preston (who both played on the original) handle the singing. Neither man’s voice can be called warbly, and their performances throw the balance off completely. In high tribute-concert form, the band interpolates the “Hey Jude” na-nas toward the end. The song has never sounded schmaltzier, or more soaked in embalming fluid. I only listened to this version once. ✹
Galaxie 500: ‘Isn’t It A Pity?’
In both high school and college I found the end of my junior year more poignant than graduation. Both times, seeing my slightly older friends and classmates reaching the end made me newly appreciative of the reality that I would soon be doing the same. But: not yet! With a year left to go I had mental room to lean into the poignancy, almost savoring it. (When graduation came, by contrast, I told myself I was over it, ready for the next chapter, itching to go — c’mon already.2) One afternoon late in the spring of 2006, stumbling out of a five-hour seminar on Hegel and Marx, I found myself sitting out on some campus patch of grass, talking and drinking beers with a spontaneously formed group of seniors-about-to-graduate and juniors-about-to-become-seniors (I was in the second group). Some of us were friends, some of us were acquaintances, and some of us had never really talked before.3 The glue binding us all together was our shared relationship to time and to change, to our overlapping transitions-in-progress. There was sadness in the air, but it was mostly kept at bay by good weather, beer, and mostly unspoken fellow-feeling. This beautiful, fuzzy cover — which I’d never heard until this week, and which instantly sent me back to that afternoon in the spring of 2006 — does something similar: the sadness of Harrison’s original is there, but you’re insulated from its full force by the bright haze of the performance. For the moment, life’s pains can’t hurt you. Which doesn’t mean you won’t cry. ✹
I have no idea if this is actually what happened. Amateur Beatles scholars, feel free to weigh in.
Tracks fans will recognize this as the subject of my very first piece here.
Galaxie 500 version alters the chords a bit substituting the 7ths, which to me evoke more emotion, with a minor cord. Makes the song less poignant I think.
Love Galaxie 500!