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I usually write a top ten list but for the first day of the New Year, I thought I'd go along with three songs that have been in heavy rotation for the past month or so
Over My Dead Body – Drake
Sophia – Laura Marling
Shake it up – Florence + The Machine
Two of this reach a point of catharcism, two of them feel autobiographical, all have a certain darkness, especially Drake, all three made my best of 2011 list. "Shake It Out" is about recovering for an alcohol, about moving on with your life. Getting it together. Which makes it a rarity on Ceremonials. Ceremonials, which opens with wedding bells that sounds more like for whom the bell tolls, is far more miserable than 21.
The lessons Drake is more powerful, and the realization that he isn't them any more, is very upsetting. "Shout out to all my niggas living tax free
Now-a-days it's six figures when they tax me…" is the lightbulb dawning, it pulls him out of one tax bracket and into another. And as he fails to break up with a girl from the old days" Time to take you away from me, only over my dead body" is the point of course.
"Sophia" takes Laura Marling to the very end, to judgment, as she wracks revenge on a man. The speeded up to a gallop chorus is a hook's hook. The song starts slow,, outline traces of betrayal and "I'm not a woman to go and place blame, but I heard that it was coming on judgment day". The song starts with a sexual betrayal and ends with the man on his knees begging for forgiveness and stars off as a folk song and ends as a folk rock denouncement
All three are about time. Drake in the past, Florence in the present, Laura in the future. Drake is trying to survive a relationship on the skids, Laura is ruminating the price for lying and Florence just wants to get over a hangover. This is apt stuff for New Year's Day: the place where the present meets the past and the future.