Johnny Marr sings “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”

I don’t think I understand Johnny Marr’s accent anymore. He’s not trying to sound American, but he seems to have lost several of his vowels in an offscreen accident and replaced them with Isaac Brock’s spares.

Anyway, this is exciting contrast for the nerdy. Morrissey’s made some changes over the years, but Marr does a massive edit – turning the famous mandolin outro into a bridge, losing the repetition/no repetition tension which originally supported the two verses, and shifting the chords until they comment on the original more than reproduce it. They’ve both tweaked the song to their modern needs, and in the process, they’ve diverged completely from what they wrote together.

Marr is the only guitarist I know who plays in English. He uses chords like words; the progressions are like elegant, well-written sentences spoken in a strong voice. I could even edge out further, and say that the core sense in his Smiths songs is an ecstatic admonishment (the one he uses for Modest Mouse is more of an abstract anxious tentative joy) – though that’s no universal, and obviously I wouldn’t go so far as to say you can turn this stuff directly into words or even that directly into named emotion. I’m not trying to claim  him for the word-people so much as say that, somehow, he’s one instrumentalist word-people think we understand.

Maybe it has something to do with his synesthesia – I read an interview with Marr once where he explains (without using the word) that he has a mental cross-wiring that gives him a sort of internal Windows Media visualizer. He “sees” sounds. The Smiths look like “a circular stained-glass window;” Bob Dylan’s voice is “definitely an organic sandy wood color.” It’s a trait we share (along with Vladimir Nabokov, and -thank you, Wikipedia- Patrick Stump…) – so I know what he means, though to me Dylan sounds more of a lager brown. Anyway, perhaps this blurring of the senses relates to the verbal or visual qualities that make his playing so legible to people who, like me, aren’t native speakers of non-vocal music.

Johnny Marr – Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right (2002?)