20. One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell
19. Driving Your Girlfriend Home
18. Munich Air Disaster 1958
(Obviously, scroll down the blog to see read my thoughts on each of those tracks)
Which brings us to #17 on the list:
#17: Seasick, Yet Still Docked (Morrissey/White)
From the album Your Arsenal
Key Line: "I am a poor, freezinly cold soul, so far from where I intended to go..."
You knew we were going to get to the ballads pretty soon, right?
Despite Mozzer's return to his more confrontational roots on Your Arsenal, the second half does come with a "straight to the heart," one-two punch of ballads with "Seasick, Yet Still Docked" and "I Know It's Going To Happen Someday."
While the latter of those tracks tends to attract the most attention in the conversation of "Best Mozzer Ballads," I've always been more fond of "Seasick" for a couple of reasons.
First, lyrically, it's easy to pigeonhole this track as another "woe is me, nobody loves me" Morrissey dirge, and, admittedly, there is some truth to that. It seems to me, however, that with the line, "Scavenging through life's very constant lows..." that Morrissey is painting a larger picture.
What Morrissey seems to be implying is that, even with the companionship he lacks, life will still be a struggle. That, perhaps with companionship, the ship will no longer be docked. It says nothing of the seasickeness, which would almost assuredly remain.
What truly elevates the song to "classic" status, though, is the work done by Alain White and Mick Ronson. White's tune is certainly a charmer. His acoustic strums and electric plucks recreate the feeling of the wind rushing through the dockyards, forcing someone to pull their collar up and their had down.
Ronson's atmospherics, however, are nothing short of genius. As with nearly all of the album, the little sounds added to "Seasick, Yet Still Docked," are deployed brilliantly. The vague, ghoulish sounds that drift from speaker to speaker over the course of the song brilliantly leave the question of whether those souls are howling from the docks or from Morrissey's own head.
The song ends with Ronson's best move yet, taking a slightly defeated tone at the 3:50 mark, only to rally aggressively 10 seconds later. It's as if he's trying to create the, for lack of a better term, "defeatist optimism" of Morrissey's lyrics. Of course, the aggressive rally last just a few seconds itself and the music returns to it's previous unease. Whether Morrissey captured this feeling through the arrangement or Ronson built it after hearing Morrissey's performance, rarely have producer and songwriter come together to paint a picture quite so brilliantly.
