1.  Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Waters. I feel like half of this blog is me talking about how I prefer subtler, sneakier forms of emotional expression to big, in-your-face ones, but that’s my taste and it’s hard to avoid mentioning it when big, in-your-face songs come along.  Case in point:  I’d take “Scarborough Fair” or “The Sound of Silence” over “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” a thousand times over.  In the context of a ballad, the big string section and reverb-drenched snare drums and soaring vocals totally turn me off and make it impossible for me to feel anything other than “get out of my face!”  I like the earlier parts of the song well enough, particularly Garfunkel’s voice, with his fragile tone and small, fast vibrato, trailing quiet reverb behind it.  But even there, I can tell that melodrama is just around the corner.  I have a feeling I’m going to be saying this a lot in the next few posts.

2.  The Carpenters – Close to You. Oh, so that’s where the line “why do birds suddenly appear every time you’re near” comes from.  I can’t quite figure out if I like this song or not.  It’s also a bit overblown, but it’s got a lot of intriguing and surprising orchestrational details, from the brief, spare, staccato trumpet solo, the occasional blips of harpsichord, and the heavily processed, shiny background vocals that show up from time to time.  I have a feeling Mr. Bungle had this song in mind as a reference point when they wrote “Sweet Charity,” though of course it’s nowhere near that weird.  Karen Carpenter’s voice is very prominent in the mix, giving her a larger-than-life quality that reminds me of the way Miles Davis’s trumpet floats over the other instruments in Bitches Brew.  And then there’s the passage starting “On the day that you were born,” which suddenly brings the song back to the 50s with a rhythm straight out of Tab Hunter’s “Young Love.”

3.  The Guess Who – American Woman. What have these guys got against American women?  The song is incredibly hostile — you can ever hear Chad Allan sing what sounds like “American woman, American shit” just as the song fades out — but the hostility is almost all generic, with lines like “American woman, get away from me” and “Don’t come hanging round my door.”  The only lyrics that give anything like an explanation are “I don’t need your war machines / I don’t need your ghetto scenes,” but I don’t know why they would blame women rather than male politicians for either of those things.  Pretty baffling.  Lyrics aside, it’s a pretty ordinary bluesy rock song.  Its most distinctive feature is the scratchy, droney, psychedelic-ish, mixolydian-inflected guitar riff at the end of the choruses.  Not much to say besides that.

4.  B.J. Thomas – Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. As with several of the other top hits of 1970, I’ve heard people sing bits of this one more often than I’ve actually heard the song.  Now that I’m listening to it more attentively, I keep thinking “oh, that reminds me of such-and-such” without being able to quite place what the such-and-such is.  Randy Newman?  Some later Beatles song?  Some indie-retro-pop song?  I don’t know, but I’m certain that the thing that’s tickling my memory is the combination of lazy close-miked guitar strumming and the tonic going to the tonic major seventh in 6/5 position, which together create an elusive summery nostalgic feeling.  And then there’s the way the piano is recorded:  it sounds like the mics are pretty much making out with the strings, which is one of the most distinctively early-70s-sounding things you can do when producing a song.  But enough about the production and arrangement. What about the composition?  It’s a cute song, with probably the cartooniest lyrics ever written about getting through hard times (“I just did me some talkin’ to the sun / And I said I didn’t like the way he got things done”) and a pleasantly leapy vocal line.  It’s also got a surprise at the end: a repeated faux-bossa riff in alternating 4/4 and 5/4.  Huh?

5.  Edwin Starr – War. More funk!  This one’s a very direct anti-Vietnam-War song, but it’s so damn fun that it’s hard to think about politics and global tragedy while listening to it.  “GOOD GOD Y’ALL!”  That’s almost as good as the “Get-up-a-with-the-get-down” from Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie.”  I love the way Starr (always on the border between singing and screaming) and his backing vocalists (aggressive rhythmic chanting) trade parts of sentences:  “WAR!”  “What is it good for?”  “Absolutely…” “Nuthin’!”  Also love the rhyme of “heartbreaker” with “undertaker,” and the juicy clavinet basslines.  Let me officially predict right now:  funk will be the thing that keeps me going as I work my way through the top fives of the 1970s.