After fighting writer’s block for four years, Drive-By Truckers singer/guitarist Mike Cooley is now back to work. English Oceans (ATO) is Cooley’s return to full-on songwriting—splitting the tracklist right down the middle after letting bandmate Patterson Hood steer the ship for the two albums prior—and is a return to form for the group as a whole. While DBT has never been a band to slack on the road or in the studio, English Oceans has the vigor and exuberance that made it one of America’s best rock groups. Cooley, Hood, bassist Matt Patton and multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Drive-By Truckers feature.
Gonzalez: I first heard a snippet of Mina via a sample in an Elvis Costello song off of his album When I Was Cruel. My wife and I had the CD on our honeymoon in Italy, so when we went to a record store, I immediately went to the M section and bought an album called Studio Uno ’66. At the time, I didn’t know she was an Italian pop institution and had had 71 singles on the charts during her long career.
A serious musical detriment of mine (and probably some sort of ADD related disorder) is the lack of ability to listen to the second side, act or program of an album, cassette or, in this case, CD. I swear, I instinctively stopped at song six—where side one of an LP would end. I have many albums that I actually love, but, for some reason, haven’t made it to side two.
If I had gone one more song in, I would have heard “Se Telefonando” in 2002 and would have had about 10 more years of enjoying this epic earworm of a track. As it was, I ran across it years later, again on Facebook, posted by another of my friends with great taste. It was a lip-synched performance in black and white from Italian TV in 1966. Mina is tall and statuesque with big, soulful, mascara-laden eyes, two darkened beauty marks on her cheek and, lending an alien air and pre-dating Bowie by six or seven years, shaved eyebrows!
The song itself was co-written by Mina along with three other writers, the main composer being the maestro, Ennio Morricone. Apparently he was a pop arranger before becoming a film-scoring phenomenon. The main musical theme was made up of three repeating notes, which Morricone claimed were transcribed from the siren of a French police car. The song is similar to Roy Orbison’s operatic hits in that it starts quietly and builds and builds throughout the song, exploding into the police siren chorus, which then modulates up a major third (which is a huge jump up and was used, not as effectively IMHO, at the end of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On a Prayer”). The monumental chorus is bolstered by high string lines doubling a female choir, low blaring brass and a generous helping of wall-of-sound reverb.
As much as I love the song on it’s own, its Mina’s performance on the TV show that slays me. I don’t even understand what she saying (which is a shame as I’m half Italian and should be able to at least understand bits and pieces)—but her facial expressions say it all. She veers from emotion to emotion, sometimes defiantly staring the camera down, another time looking down as if lost in thought. It culminates in this one moment toward the end of the song (2:14, to be exact) when I’m absolutely slayed by a brief flash of a coy smile that is gone as quickly as it appeared. I generally am not a huge fan of lip-synched perfomances, but this is one is high drama worthy of Puccini or Verdi.
