Still Looks Like Rain

Yesterday I started digging into my laptop music stash for rain songs. Some of our readers have been contributing suggestions, too, in the comments to that post. Since it’s still raining today, here are a few more I found on the laptop:

Mary Chapin Carpenter is not as prolific a rain-song singer as Rosanne Cash, although she put a lovely song about Hurricane Katrina survivors on her album The Calling, “Houston”: “Last night I dreamed of rain but golden light was all I saw.” (For more hurricane songs, click here.) Boz Scaggs made a rare appearance in Madison last year, performing just a handful of tunes, one of which was “Runnin’ Blue”: “Left my billfold at the airport/My suitcase on a train/Now I can’t find my umbrella/And it sure looks like rain.” Which is the story of my life.

Some songs do more than merely mention rain—they conjure up the feeling of being out in it, or sitting inside watching it. Take jazz pianist Bill Evans’ version of Paul Simon’s “I Do it For Your Love.” Evans does it as an instrumental (recorded, as it turned out, at the last show he played before his death in September 1980), but Simon’s original opens with the lyric line “We got married on a rainy day.” The song always comes with images of people waiting for buses on wet city streets. The Eagles’ “The Sad Cafe,” from The Long Run, sets the rainy mood from the first note and states its intention to carry it through from the first couplet: “Out in the shiny night/The rain was softly falling.” Maria Muldaur’s “Oh Papa,” from her 1974 breakthrough album Waitress in the Donut Shop, doesn’t mention rain at all, but it just sounds like it, right down to a sweet guitar solo that’s like nothing so much as raindrops running down the window.

More?

“She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running/Like a watercolor in the rain” (Al Stewart, “Year of the Cat”)
“You must believe in the falling rain” (the Bee Gees, “Don’t Wanna Live Inside Myself”)
“When the rain came I thought you’d leave” (Rod Stewart, “Mandolin Wind”)
“You better come on in my kitchen/It’s gon’ to be rainin’ outdoors” (“Come on in My Kitchen,” Robert Johnson)
“Hard rain following on/Cold wheels moving on” (Steve Winwood, “Night Train”)
“Blue eyes laughing in the sun/Laughing in the rain” (“Blue Eyes” by Elton John)
“When the rain washes you clean you’ll know” (Fleetwood Mac, “Dreams”)
“Standing in the rain with his head hung low” ( “Jukebox Hero” by Foreigner)

Admitting to “Jukebox Hero” on my laptop is more embarrassing to me than admitting to “Rainy Days and Mondays” was yesterday.

As we’re already established, a great rain song doesn’t even need to mention rain. One of the first songs I thought of as I started skimming the list yesterday was “Drowning in the Sea of Love” by Joe Simon—”I’m in the middle of a bad love storm.” And from there, it was a short hop to Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara,” making different use of the same metaphor: “Drowning in the sea of love/Where everyone would love to drown.” And once we cut ourselves loose from the need to mention the word “rain,” uh, the heavens open up.

“Riders on the Storm” by the Doors
“Shower the People” by James Taylor
“Me and Bobby McGee”: “Windshield wipers slapping time/I was holdin’ Bobby’s hand in mine.”
“Emotional Weather Report” by Tom Waits, a talking blues that includes “A line of thunderstorms was developing in the early morning ahead of a slow moving cold front cold blooded with tornado watches issued shortly before noon Sunday for the areas including the western region of my mental health and the northern portions of my ability to deal rationally with my disconcerted precarious emotional situation.”
Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up,” from Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia, featured in a scene where all the characters, in different places, sing the song together. (Magnolia is one of the greatest rain movies ever, but that’s another post entirely.)

And then there’s the one that seems most appropriate of all to us here in southern Wisconsin after absorbing 11-plus inches of rain in the last three weeks, most of it since last Saturday, and where more is falling as I type.

“Higher Ground” (live in London 1974)/Stevie Wonder (buy the original version here, on a new compilation to be released this week)