Matt Pond PA, “The Party” (The Nature of Maps, 2002)
Toby Goodshank, “The Death of My Enemies” (Di Santa Ragione, 2006)
Rounds are the easiest form of part singing, and songwriters sometimes take advantage of their inherent prettiness to pen refrains that don’t mean much of anything. (When I first heard “Sons and Daughters,” the snowballing closer of The Decemberists’ The Crane Wife, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was too easy, that the four repeated lines could have been rewritten or swapped about and it would have been the same song). But when pulled off, they can be intense and magical moments that command the whole of your attention.
Such is this gem from Matt Pond PA’s 2002 The Nature of Maps; I haven’t paid much mind to their subsequent releases, but this is a song I’ll be putting on mixtapes for years to come. It starts out minimally enough, with a series of verses about the thoughts that swirl through a teenager’s mind in the course of a weekend, backed by a guitar and cello whose main purpose is to stay out of the way. But in the song’s second half, as the verses start stacking atop one another, we see that their melodies have been designed to interlock, each one occupying its own rhythmic and tonal space. It’s a neat trick, one that uses the form of the round perfectly by allowing the listener to focus at once on the whole and the parts. Toby Goodshank keeps it simple too, which is unusual—most of his songs (and there are an awful lot) are stream-of-consciousness word torrents that demand multiple listens just to catch all the puns, references, and scandalous jokes. But on “The Death of My Enemies,” he’s content to trade between two pithy declarations: a Darth Vader-evoking “I have you now,” followed by the self-satisfied addendum, “It’s amazing.”
