Like A Pound Or A Key

Al Green: Belle
from The Belle Album (The Right Stuff 1977) also on Greatest Hits (Capitol 1995)

Every once in a while I'll discover a song and find myself so enamored with it I'll constantly play it to the point of exhaustion. I might return to it after a while hoping to rediscover that initial feeling that struck me when I heard it for the first time. Most of the time, I'll find out that my obsession with the song was a superficial one. It might have been a catchy melody or a witty line or the context in which I heard the song (being drunk at a club can be especially deceiving for judging the value of a song), but for whatever reason my obsession is just an ephemeral one. The songs which stay with me forever, the ones that I can come back to again and again and not find my interest dwindling are sometimes the ones that have to grow on me. At first I might find myself simply enjoying the song, but with each listening I find that initial feeling of the discovery of the beauty of the song growing instead of diminishing.

Case in point, Al Green's "Belle." Recorded after the Willie Mitchell production era (an era that produced all of his most famous songs), this song captures the spiritual rebirth that had occured several years earlier. Just as much confession as a song, Belle still retains the Willie Mitchell sound which only helps to emphasize the theme of the struggle between the singers secular and his spiritual yearnings. Everything about this song works perfectly. The introspective keys of the piano complements the warm bass line, the reluctance in Greens voice as he delivers the line "seems so easy to me/ to try to act naturally" or his confidence when he sings "He brought me safe thus far/ through many drunken country bars" and when the synthesizer kicks in on the second verse, it's perfectly prefaced by the pithy line, "It's you I want but it's Him that I need." By the time he breaks it down at the end of the song it almost sounds as if the tug-of-war is one sided, but just as the song fades out, it becomes evident that the struggle is much longer and deeper than you might have previously been led to believe.