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 “The Letter” by The Box Tops:

This is a great song; this is one of the greatest pop-rock songs of all time. I have plans one day to write an essay about this song, and the various versions of it I own, but in the meantime, this is the version that made it famous.  What’s to like? Alex Chilton’s slightly hoarse delivery, for one, which make me think he’s been telling everybody he’s run into for the entire trip to the airport that he’s got to get back to his baby.  Then there’s the bass-register horn section, pomp-parrumping away underneath the rhythm section, counterpointed by the sweeping string arrangement, and the ? and the Mysterians-esque organ tapping along the top.  And that’s just the music; I haven’t even gotten to the story that the lyrics are ripped out of: we’re here at the climactic moment of a long narrative, and whatever’s happned in the past, the narrator has busted his ass to the airport, and he’s at the desk trying to buy the damn ticket home to his baby again; all this conveyed in two verses and a short chorus, which then repeat, and round out at two minutes, the sounds of taking-off and landing planes filling the background.  There’s a lot happening in this short song, and no matter how many times I listen to it, the excitement never wanes.