My nomination (Paris 1919) is probably going out to 808 State which I can’t really begrudge, it’s a classic, but “Paris” is so great so I’ll do a thread on it (1/1919) https://twitter.com/peoples_pop/status/1387462229839187976

First, the music - gorgeous innit. The words “classically trained” used to be thrown about quite a lot in pop bios, but obviously Cale has proper chops here and a background in minimalism meaning he knows what to leave out. So the orchestral pop backing is lush but never sickly.

Strings in pop are generally used for ambient prettiness - here they’re a brisk rhythm section, which leaves enough space for the solo woodwind instruments to do their mournful thing on top.

The effect is one of determined, slightly pompous busy-ness (underlined by those repetitions in the lyrics - “William William William”, “singing crying singing”, “efficiency efficiency”) with just a hint of melancholy. Which is apt since...

...we’re at the Paris 1919 Peace Conference, which is combining celebration, triumphalism, loads of backstairs diplomacy, a Gallic sense of theatre and of course a post-war European settlement which - spoilers - is not going to end well.

The song, notoriously hard to ‘interpret’, switches from a narrator pursuing a woman (or a phantom) he sees, to the general chaos of the event, and both sections feel to me linked by this sense of trying to create, or force, order and understanding on a situation.

Mostly the lyrics are a procession of evocative images, and they’re great: I’ll zoom in on one - “I’m the church and I’ve come to claim you with my iron drum”. It’s sung with huge confidence, and it immediately brings to mind incense-swinging, black clad priests

(I spent ages googling to work out if there is a specific ritual being referred to and there isn’t - in which case the phrase “iron drum” is just brilliant as an invention of the kind of archaic operation Cale wants to invoke)

It’s also quite a violent image, “claiming”, taking ownership, ‘iron drum’ also having a sense of harshness and confinement, and the song keeps offering these oppositions of the spectral, the vague, the casual vs the well-ordered, ritualistic, calendrical.

You’re never quite sure with Cale (or with any imagist songwriter) which lyrics mean something, which are private references, which are just in because they make poetic sense or sing well. A line by line read of Paris 1919 is possible but risks massive over-reading of a song...

...which is ultimately (I reckon) not entirely in favour of attempts to categorise and neaten. One last thing tho - the song’s final surreal image of Beaujolais raining. As the music soars into its final chorus it sounds like a celebration, but...