Song Of The Day 6/11/2015: Aloe Blacc – “Good Things”

Supreme, Incredible, God-Like Champions of Understatement: It was clear I was going to support the general aims of Aloe Blacc not long after I’d heard him the first time. A compatriot of mine in the office where I worked – the music write-off of a chronically passé productivity firm whose mission appeared to be to sabotage as many music business careers as possible, mine obviously included – played Blacc’s unfortunately very applicable “I Need a Dollar,” nearly every day. Blacc immediately reminded me of Bill Withers, that leveled tone coming out with maybe a little more edge, kind of providing an automatic center to everything he sang about. It’s one of the great pop songs of this century. Eventually it would become a little too literal for me, but it sure was nice to hear it again just now, since I’ve made at least 46 cents back. (It was also the theme to an HBO documentary series I don’t have the time to look up right now.)

Good Things was the 2010 album that had “I Need a Dollar.” It also had a vast reworking of Lou Reed’s Velvets song “Femme Fatale” (I want to say I read somewhere that Blacc’s version was Reed’s all-time favorite, but I can’t look that up now either). I think the album was on my year-end Top 20. Its title track was a bouncy moment of positivity that enveloped the second half of the album. Blacc went on to capture a couple of huge hits, providing uncredited vocals to Avicii’s electro-acoustic dance hit “Wake Me Up,” and grafting Elton John’s “Your Song” into “The Man,” which was turned into commercials featuring harried professional athletes escaping post-game media pressers and hostile Northwest fan bases with the help of Beats By Dre products. (By the way -- I know of not one incident of Seahawks fans either throwing objects at or urinating upon Colin Kaepernick's team bus. Besides, it's really no fun to pick on the 49ers anymore.)