Paul Williams’ Surf Music

I don’t remember when I first heard Surf Music. I think it was sometime in early January. I’m not sure how it ended up in my Spotify library, either—if you were the person who recommended this to me and I saved it and then totally forgot, thank you.

I’m still trying to figure out why I’m so drawn to Williams’s music. The connection seems subconscious. Maybe if I paid more attention in my Physics of Music class that I took for my math requirement, I’d have an answer for you.

I wouldn’t say this album is a winter soundtrack, but it was one for me. I remember waiting for the bus in the cold February darkness, watching the cars move past on the distant highway to Bond Themes from the Early 80’s, imagining how fun a summer full of these songs would be. My listening wasn’t present; it projected the sound into the future, even when the future never came.

Williams’ songs give off a level of both confidence and vulnerability that feels more genuinely human than anything I’ve heard in a long time. Nothing on Me is both a song about realizing someone you love can be happy with someone else, and a song that has one of my all-time favourite spoken interludes:
“When a man eats paddle pop cyclones (an Australian popsicle)
and he bites into the side of it like it’s corn on the cob
that man’s weird”

There’s something about songs that have really specific references, even if I don’t know what those references are. It’s intimate—the artist is taking a chance by showing you a small corner of their life. While I’ve never been to New Zealand’s Federal Deli—the setting of the song of the same title—I know that sometimes menial things can make you cry, and that it’s nice to have someone who loves you enough to care:
“The most jovial girl
I got her crying up in Federal Deli
I swear the food is never this slow, this slow
But I promise that I’ll always love you”

A similar thing occurs in the final track, Marina:
“And Tim K’s here buying a bagel
I don’t care
I’m frozen here in Waverly
As I watch you walk away from me”

Here, we’re reminded of Williams’s humour, along with this vivid scene painting. It’s funny, but it’s also endearing. Maybe I just really want someone to care about me more than bagels or food that’s arrived late.

Possibly my favorite track, Clouston Bridge is an ode to young love and a testament to Williams’s lyrical prowess. The feeling when you first fall in love is so easily and beautifully summed up:
“Text from your brother says we talk too loud
Oh that’s right there’s other people”

The summer I was longing for never came—but while many of these certified bops™️ could be blasted at a pool party, I think that in the extended winter solitude, I had a more intimate relationship with the album.

The title track longs for California, “where they put all the right notes in all the right places,” but it also acknowledges the distance from that imagined place. Williams’ album represented the same thing for me that this ambitious surf music did for him:
“When I hear that surf music
I hear that sound
It’s telling me don’t let shit get you down.”

You can listen to Surf Music here:
Spotify: https://goo.gl/JrvJqK
Apple Music: https://goo.gl/XrZMdm
Bandcamp: https://goo.gl/ctmKSr