"'But what does it mean?'...

... 'What does it mean? Nothing.'" That exchange between a horny, middle-aged cocktail waitress and Tom Cruise is the key moment in the movie Cocktail. He has just showed her and her equally horny, equally middle-aged co-workers an incomprehensible coin-trick/huddle exercise thing that I defy anyone to explain. The fact that one of the waitresses actually does ask him to explain it, and the nature of his answer are examples of why I can say the movie is special in not merely an "I love stupid trash!" kind of way...

There's been a lot of movie music lately, but don't worry, I didn't uncover a forgotten gem from the Cocktail soundtrack. I've only called on Cruise's TGIFriday's wisdom to help illuminate Nancy Elizabeth's "In the Morning". There aren't many lyrics in the song, and it's possible that I've missed one or two key words, but it really doesn't seem to be about anything. That emotive--just shy of florid--piano-break in the middle seems to be what it's all about. It's the main musical draw, and seems to be concealing something that happened 'last night' (from the narrator's point of view) that was so heavy she's not even going to get into it. She'd rather end the song after two minutes, and it's probably a good move, because I doubt whatever happened would be as revelatory to us as it is to her.

Judging by her new album ("In the Morning" is a B-side), not a lot has happened to her. But Leaf didn't sign her for reasons of grit or life-experience. Her record is lonely-bower music: vague, lush, bedroom-jams for suburban Rapunzels on both sides of the Atlantic. She isn't a total 19th-century pretender--the word "bower" wouldn't quite fit in to any of her songs--and yet there is something undeniably Victorian-feeling about her instrumentation and the generic loftiness of her song-writing. If the lyrics were a little better, the album could be better, but as it is it's not without interest.

"Weakened Bow" arguably outdoes "In the Morning"--the cyclic guitar, Indian harmonium, and deep double-tracked vocals are real nice to get lost in. But it does ask you to deal with the line: "Unkind actions melt me". Another song, "How Can I Stop?" makes surprisingly good use of a manic cello-drone by blurring/dampening its impact in the mix so it sounds subdued but conveys anxiety at the same time. In general she's able to make dramatic arrangement details work far better than they should, only the harp gets to be over-bearing at times...

Advice for improvement would be to let someone rescue you from the tower or whatever--especially if they have dirty things on their mind--it might give you something to write about next time...Hope it happens soon, too, because the hourglass is nearly run down on all things folky...

Nancy Elizabeth--In the Morning
Nancy Elizabeth--Weakened Bow