Photo titled "Portrait of Frankie Laine and Jimmy Crawford" by William Gottlieb, 1946
"Untangled" comes from Shoes' 1989 album Stolen Wishes, the beginning of a second-iteration resurgence for the Illinois power-pop band. You can tell that it was written by guitarist Gary Klebe - it has that crunchy feel to it that contrasts so nicely with the softer, more wistful numbers the band's Murphy brothers specialized in. "Untangled" isn't a well-known track from this record, but it's a favorite of mine. The structure of the song is kind of interesting - each verse starts with four declarations, followed by three questions. This is a perfect setup for the chorus, and the verse-chorus transition is easily the song's best element. A double-time tambourine is added, and harmonizing backing vocals come in to echo each of the chorus's lines. It's a clever use of lyric structure to emphasize the shifts in the arrangement, and the melody is pretty hooky as well - the result is one of my favorite Shoes tunes.
"Untangled" by Shoes
2 comments:
That is a great tune, but more to the point, that is an incredible picture of Frankie Laine! Where did you find that?
Hey Klinger -
The Library of Congress has been publishing a bunch of William Gottlieb's jazz photos on Flickr:
Gottlieb Jazz Photos
Some of them are AMAZING, and I think they're still in the process of putting more up there.
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