Harry Nilsson– All I Think About Is You

It’s hard to pinpoint why you are sometimes suddenly driven to listen to a song to which you haven’t listened for years. As an active collector of music for over 30 years, I have to be candid; that three-decade span amounts to an awful lot of music—or, perhaps, a lot of awful music—and not all of it gets immediately remembered. Oh, you might catch a snatch of it on the radio, or in the club, or while you’re out shopping, or you might have found it referenced in an article or a message board somewhere and become anxious to renew your acquaintance with it. And then, at other times such as last week, while bedridden with a rather nasty bout of the ‘flu, you harvest an inexplicable craving to listen to Harry Nilsson’s “All I Think About Is You.”

I’d been fond of that record at the time of its original release in the autumn of 1977 but had not consciously listened to it much since then. It was not a big hit—caught between the two giant incisors of punk and disco, there wasn’t really any room left in the marketplace for a touch of the Schmilsson—but it was Nilsson’s last hit single and very nearly his last work of consequence. It is essentially an orchestral ballad, but one which starkly signals the end of the affair rather than the beginning of something else. Remember how shocking Nilsson’s sudden octave leap into high-pitched grief on “Without You” was, how it was the last thing you’d have expected from a light tenor who generally maintained a dignified, subdued air on matters of love and loss—contrast with the dutifully suppressed grief of “One” or “Without Her”—and marvel at this single emotional departure which was enough to make Jimmy Webb, who was recording an album of his own in the studio next door at the time, proclaim it the greatest popular vocal performance ever recorded.

There are no high notes on “All I Think About Is You;” rather the song is sung in a somewhat weary baritone, as if there is no longer any need for those high Cs to be attained. At times—for instance “I’ll stand an hour knocking”—he almost sounds as if he’s sending up Leonard Cohen; another muse who endlessly dreams of dying in nine angels’ arms. But the weariness of Nilsson’s performance here is hard won; a meditation on a past life which he cannot possibly let go. “How can I run away from darkness at the close of day / When all I think about is you?”

The masterstroke was to employ, as arranger, Gordon Jenkins, the man whose Mahlerian strings had soundtracked the darkest, bleakest albums Sinatra ever made—Where Are You? and No One Cares (why do record shops insist on filing these records under “easy listening”?). Here his strings are practically seraphic in their Stygian stillness, patiently proceeding up and down the song’s semitones like the oars of Charon. But there are two other crucial touches: the panoramic canyon of echoing guitar which opens and closes the song is a clear precedent of the Cocteau Twins, and the angelic choir, which seems to embrace Nilsson as they entomb him. Note how, after Nilsson finally gives up on life with that never-more-resigned “whoa!” at 2:39, the choir returns in three separate layers, their one-note harmonies sustained to create ineffable poignancy. And when the song disappears, Nilsson too is gone, virtually for good—a decade later, on Hal Willner’s Disney concept album Stay Awake, his painful performance of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” indicates a voice which had literally been shot to pieces.

But: “She doesn’t live here anymore”—as with Billy Fury’s “In Thoughts Of You” and Everything But The Girl’s “Missing,” the clear subtext here is that she doesn’t live anywhere anymore, is beyond human reach, can never come back. It is a craving for a deceased world. Perhaps then it is little wonder that I desire to speak of this song rather than others about which I should be equally inclined to write—for instance, “Bang (Get Down, Get Down!)” by Son of Bazerk, or “Eighth Cognition/All You’ve Left” by Six Organs of Admittance, or “Old Whore’s Diet” by Rufus Wainwright (you’ll believe that David Gates once recorded for Ze Records)—for its mourning mirrors my reluctance to let too many things go. How can dreams come true when all I think about…is us?

(Note on author: Mr Carlin is a former child prodigy and ongoing minor public service official who harbours grandiose and frankly dangerous delusions of being a music writer. Such delusions are shared by Uncut, The Wire and Time Out, to whose pages he periodically contributes reviews, and he has also been responsible for a neurotic triptych of weblogs: The Church Of Me, The Clothed Maja and Koons Really Does Think He’s Michelangelo. Mr. Carlin exists in various parts of London, England. He does not own an iPod, CD burner, or digital camera, as though the world suddenly stopped for him in the summer of 2001 or something)

[visit Harry Nilsson’s website here, buy Nilsson records here]