If you don’t listen to any of the other tunes in this series, at least check this one out.
Remember Seasons in the Sun? It was the soundtrack to 11-year-olds playing footsie under a shady tree, and other such sweets. It launched a then-30-year-old Terry Jacks (he’s 76 now, yikes) to international fame and it was so big it gave him the one-hit-wonder tag, even though he did have other, more modest singles (If You Go Away got light rotation on AM radio, as did this one).
Call it sweet, call it schlock, it was all very harmless, rose-coloured stuff.
Then a year later, Dude broke bad.
No benign vignette, this: Christina was an unsettling allegory set to a slap-echo, breathy voice underneath a glassy piano, moaning countermelodies and threatening pizzicati. The chorus itself is first vocal, and then ends with an instrumental envoie; it marshals us to uneasy suggestions and then just leaves us there.
Lyrically, the evocative image of ‘an angel slept beside your bed’ lain over stark minor chords is a chilling piece of word-tone painting. It had our now-12-year-old listener shaking under the covers and turning to Alice Cooper for comfort (sidetrack – Welcome to my Nightmare dropped within a week of this).
Terry, jeez. We hardly knew ya.
