These puppies do exist, and it’s nice. “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers. Sedates a whole belligerent bar, all in a single bound.
“Not Even the Trees” by Hootie & the Blowfish. Great emotion to volume ratio. Track 10 on Cracked Rear View, it somehow has a harder edge than the rest of the tracks, and sneaks up on you with brilliant chord changes in just enough quantity, and just the right spots.
And in the case of “Black Water,” how can you hear “Catfish are jumpin'” and not feel better? This band too had a sophistication about them that’s often underrated and overlooked. Most bands aren’t able so effortlessly to throw a key change right smack in the song’s bustling hub — the commencement of the chorus, which is exactly what they do, though I’m not exactly sure what the interval is. But I don’t think this is irrelevant, either.
Going back to “Not Even the Trees” for a second, man, Darius Rucker is seriously facing an abyss of hopelessness here, and he generates it all onto the wax. Certain aspects of the song are still inexplicable to me, that is, Rucker crafted a multitudinously layered structure of a song where we see what exits the fold — the title finally being mentioned at the end, so that this is what you remember, when in reality there’s a bunch you forget, or, that “grows” on you. Pile it on, D.