Certain Songs #753: The Jazz Butcher

Album: Cult of The Basement
Year: 1990

A melancholy crush set to music, the unbearably lovely “Girl Go” is probably my favorite Jazz Butcher song.

Opening with just a single reverb-swathed guitar meandering around waiting for the drums build slowly into the song proper, “Girl Go” takes its sweet time getting to where it wants to go, because it assumes from the start that you’re as infatuated with the girl in question as Pat Fish is.

And if you’re not, you will be by the time the song is over, because from the girl herself saying “have you seen the stars” in French, to the sax solo that sets up the first verse to the guitar pile-on that ends the song, “Girl Go” floats lazily in the sky above, as beautiful as faraway cloud formations on a clear spring day.

Everything she used to do was wrong
The time was too short
And the words were all too long
Everything she used to do was wrong
I never dreamed she’d turn up in her own song

But, of course, it didn’t even matter whether everything she did was wrong, because as the swoony guitars that introduced the chorus pointed out, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her:

Oh, look at her go
Won’t you look at her go
Won’t you look at that girl go
Oh, look at her go
Won’t you look at her go
Won’t you look at that girl go

At the end, without increasing the dreamy tempo layers upon layers of guitars start slowly shredding as if to express their sadness in her going, and the only way is to cloud their minds with a wall of sound. My guess: it didn’t work.

“Girl Go”