Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This week it’s “Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song” by Jeffrey Lewis:

Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard performed two sets at the End of the Road Festival last weekend, and along with a lecture on the history of punk rock from 1950 to 1975 and an upbeat and cheery cover of “Kurious Oranj” by The Fall, this was one of the highlights of his two performances.  First of all, I have a minor ambition to write some kind of essay about songs about music (feel free, dear reader, to rip this idea off and do it yourself), and “Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song” moves into a special subcategory of songs about music: a song about a song.  Like most Jeffrey Lewis songs, it’s entertaining and clever without being obnoxiously arch, which is a trick harder to pull off than it might seem; but it’s more than just a silly or clever song: the wistful tone that drops in at the very end, with the idea of someone singing a song about you, the listener gives the song a slightly fuller meaning than it carries otherwise.  And then of course, with two words, Jeffrey Lewis undercuts that wistfulness.  It’s not a song that will change your life, but it will make you listen to Leonard Cohen a little differently, and when you walk past the Chelsea Hotel–if you ever walk past the Chelsea Hotel–you’ll have one more rock ‘n’ roll moment to think about.