1996: One Headlight - The Wallflowers | Criminal - Fiona Apple
Looking back at 30 years of music | The Wallflowers, Fiona Apple, Nick Cave, The Cardigans, Wilco, Jamiroquai
One Headlight - The Wallflowers
Plenty of people want to follow in their parents’ footsteps; whether that would make them truck drivers, mathematicians and carpenters or perhaps preachers, doctors or lawyers heading for their day in court. When your dad is the world's most famous songwriter, getting into the family business is a pretty ballsy move.
In Jakob Dylan’s case, the family business is the business of writing songs. Chronicling the beauty and the grit in the world, the vital nature of the every day in a rhythmic, mystical and lyrical way is something that his father knows how to do better than just about anybody else walking the earth. Jakob Dylan once told Hermione Hoby of The Guardian that “writing songs is a trade just like anything else”. If so, then he learnt his craft from the best.
And yet Jakob Dylan’s most enduring and popular song, The Wallflowers’ One Headlight, has as much or maybe even more in common with the generation of writers that came up after his father; a generation of writers who were also all so heavily influenced by Bob Dylan that they could each be seen as part of the extended Dylan musical-family business, too.
There has been a long line of “New Dylans” and surely none bigger than The Boss. Bruce Springsteen could have written One Headlight and slotted it straight onto his seminal Born to Run record (Springsteen even joined The Wallflowers to sing the song at the 1997 Video Music Awards). His influence looms large over the lyrics. But he's not the only one.
In the song's second verse, the first couplet feels very Dylan whilst the next three lines are pure 70’s Springsteen:
I seen the sun comin' up at the funeral at dawn
With the long broken arm of human law
Now it always seemed such a waste
She always had a pretty face
I wondered why she hung around this place
This weaving of influences happens throughout the course of the song:
Through this maze of ugliness and greed
And I've seen the sign up ahead at the county line bridge
Sayin' all is good and nothingness is dead
is an incredibly Bob Dylan-esque phrase - it wouldn't be out of place in Señor (Tales of Yankee Power) or on a verse in Blind Willie McTell - which leads straight into the Springsteenian:
We run until she's out of breath
She ran until there's nothing left
She hit the end, just her window ledge
Leading into the chorus, Dylan Jr wails like he’s born to run and goes on to sing that “me and Cinderella, we put it all together, we can drive it home”. Perhaps he’s picking her up once she’s finished her shift sweeping up on Desolation Row.
Where influence from his father’s lyrics undoubtedly bleeds into his writing here, Jakob Dylan actually was ahead of his dad with some areas of the enterprise when it came to personnel selection and chart success.
T Bone Burnett produced Bringing Down the Horse, the album that gave us One Headlight, and later went on to produce six songs with Bob Dylan in 2021 (he had previously been part of the Rolling Thunder Revue band in 1976). Matt Chamberlain played drums on the record and would go on to tour with the elder Dylan in 2019 and feature on the 2020 masterpiece Rough and Rowdy Ways and, most famously, thanks to One Headlight, Jakob Dylan and his band The Wallflowers reached Number 1 on the singles chart way before Bob ever would (Murder Most Foul in 2020).
One Headlight is an anthem. It’s wild. It’s sneering and leering and it’s spooked up and broken down. It sounds like it has the power to bring back a beat-up and busted-out radio from the brink of oblivion through the sheer power of its guitars, driving rhythm and the gritty, world-weary vocals. Jakob Dylan has said that this song is about “the death of ideas”, but it’s safe to say when he was writing this one, his idea of what it takes to write a great song was very much alive.
Criminal - Fiona Apple
When Fiona Apple wrote Criminal she was just 17. Her debut album, Tidal, was released a year later. Not only does her voice not sound like that of an 18 year old on this recording, but her lyrics and writing seem so far beyond her years and peers that it is unbelievable.
I often marvel at how someone so young could write something so daring, so nuanced and mature. So cutting and concise and broad and yet specific. How someone so young could reach forward through time and write with the wisdom that comes from a life experience they surely haven’t yet lived long enough to accrue.
But then I remember how many times I marvel about such things; Dylan writing A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall at 21, Kate Bush writing Wuthering Heights at 18, Stevie Wonder hitting the top of the charts at 13 years old(!) with Fingertips. Mozart was composing by age 8. Perhaps it’s not surprising that all of these revolutionary artists already had such confidence in their abilities at such a young age. If I could write a song like Criminal, I'd be pretty confident in my ability to deliver it, too.
This song sounds like it was ahead of its time, but listening again now, I can’t imagine a time when it could come out and not feel that way. Whether it was released in ‘96, 2006, 2016 or 2046, this song would leave any contemporaneous releases in its wake. It still doesn’t feel like we have caught up to this talent, this composition or this singular voice in pop music yet.
The intro is intensely attention pulling; when this comes on you stop whatever else you’re doing and listen. The piano is arresting, the bass beguiling and Matt Chamberlain's heavy-hitting drum beat keeps you in line. And then in comes that ancient-beyond-its-years 18-year old voice. “I’ve been a bad, bad girl”, Apple intones. Still on the borderline of childhood herself, it’s not unlikely she could have been scolded with this phrase in the recent-past but singing it here in the first person, it feels more like a seduction than a confession. She's taking control of her narrative and her life with these words.
The next line, “I’ve been careless with a delicate man” is interesting in that she has the power in this dynamic. The child is gone, but she’s still being careless with her delicate toys and playthings just because she can. Fiona Apple has never relinquished this power, and in fact on each of her subsequent releases it has only grown.
A lot of Apple’s outstanding debut album Tidal is built up on hypnotic, beguiling piano led dream-scapes; languorous melodies and vocals, but Criminal feels like it is anticipating her next release already, and wouldn’t feel out of place on the criminally good When the Pawn…
It is hard, and jagged and it is self-confident in its insecurities and doubts. It’s to the point and it is impenetrable. It’s poetry and it’s plain. There are angels and devils here among the bad, bad girls and delicate men. This song will lay you low and raise you high. Songs like this will affirm why it is that you love listening to music so much in the first place. If you listen hard enough you can hear On the Bound and Paper Bag and Please Please Please forming in the world that Criminal is creating and what a world it is. Thank god we have this portal with which to gain access to it.
Elsewhere in 1996…
Nick Cave joined forces with Kylie Minogue and PJ Harvey as well as Anita Lane and Shane MacGowan on Murder Ballads - a brilliant collection of, well, murder ballads. Stagger Lee. Man, listen to Lloyd Price do this one and then listen to Nick Cave. I sure am glad that we have both.
The Cardigans gave us Lovefool. One of the all time great pop songs, ear-worms and underrated gems. The Swedish sure do know how to write a great song, don’t they?
Wilco followed up their good-to-occasionally-great 1995 debut A.M. with their first record to include multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, the great-and-occasionally-just-pretty-good double album Being There. A sprawling, swirling symphony of rock that is sometimes cock-sure, sometimes rock-bottom. Funny, cutting, transgressive and on the move, Wilco really get into their groove here and settle into the landscape that they’re still moving through today. I got you, and it’s all I need indeed.
Jamiroquai put out Virtual Insanity which is not a million miles removed musically from Fiona Apple’s Criminal, but while hers is swaggering and parading, his is strutting and dancing. Like Apple, he’s way ahead of his time - perhaps not as much as her, but the lyrics which could have been written off as Luddite-like at the time now come across as incredibly prescient.
Notable releases:
Beck - Odelay
Belle & Sebastian - If You’re Feeling Sinister
The Divine Comedy - Casanova
Fugees - The Score
Jay-Z - Reasonable Doubt
Mark Knopfler - Golden Heart
Nas - It Was Written
Ryuichi Sakamoto - 1996
Spice Girls - Spice
A Tribe Called Quest - Beats, Rhymes and Life