All Hail Rob Harvilla

In the months after my son came into my life, I was spending a lot of wee hours alone washing, rinsing, cleaning, wiping, and reloading so that my wife could get a few hours of sleep here and there. I had never paid much attention to Spotify’s podcasts, but, thanks to long hours standing at the sink, I had run my normal podcast content to empty and I took a chance.

I’m so thankful. Rob’s “60 songs that explain the 90’s” did cover insights about the music of my teens and twenties. But Rob’s writing and his angle of attack on the questions of music are inventive. His tone and personal anecdotes enliven and draw out laughter. Some episodes drew me straight away because I loved the song under the microscope ("Glory Box"); some I hate-listened ("Semi-Charmed Kinda Life")¹ ; but the one that I avoided the longest wound up being a powerful showcase about what makes this show so special: Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”

Most people only know one rock music critic: Lester Bangs. He’s name-dropped in an REM song and is a framing device in Almost Famous. I have read some reverential citations where he described Black Sabbath as a musical John Milton (Well, my-my!) or where he championed Detroit rock in the late 70’s. It’s probably worth reading.

But Harvilla excels not at picking music apart, but at taking the listener on a journey to discover the essence of a song or artist. Having lived through 1997, you’d think that I’d have heard all the ways to approach “My Heart Will Go On (MHWGO),” but Harvilla’s genius is backtracking from “A song that’s bigger than life sung by a woman with no restraint” to a surprising place. In this case he goes back to her titanic theatre-anthem precursor…through the 90s, to the 80s, right smack into….Meat Loaf and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”

Run forward from there and run smack into Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf’s frequent collaborator and the icon behind the biggest (not in volume of sales or volume, but in Embiggenitude) songs ever as well as the rock opera Streets of Fire (fuck yeah). So that’s the song that’s bigger than life bit. But why is Céline so….Céline?² . Run it back past the soup self-mythology about poverty, and La Belle Provence, and over a dozen kids, and disrespect from critics for decades. And then run it forward and watch her, by sheer force of will wither all the critics, get to 1997.

An unstoppable force meets an unstoppable song. Double unstoppable.

Now this is such a brilliant deconstruction that inexorably leads to 1997, MHWGO, the structuring of the argument is chef’s kiss wonderful. But then you have the language Harvilla deploys to make his point.

On Meat Loaf…

“Dune, the novel, has less plot than ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light.’”
“They are…trading freckles. They are barely 17 and barely dressed.”
“[On not understanding the sexual subtext] I thought Paradise was an external place, like Six Flags or the zoo, maybe.”
“And bummer ending to Meat Loaf’s career. By 1993 the public no longer had any interest in pompous sit-com length power-ballads with sentences for song titles sung by a quavering ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ alumnus who looked like a WWF heel, Meat Loaf was over. No I’m just kidding plays “I would do anything for Love (But I won’t do that)”
[After playing song sample] “Holy shit! I almost drove my mini-van off a cliff on my way back from the outlet mall yesterday when that chorus hit.”

On Jim Steinman…

If you have no idea what Jim Steinman looks like just picture an inconceivably awesome dude…who spent every last second of his 73 years…popping a wheelie on a motorcycle…picture 73 year long uninterrupted motorcycle wheelie…
Steinman wrote grown-ass man symphonies to god
Steinman songs aren’t movies they’re extended universes, they’re franchises, they’re theme parks
Steinman wrote every song like it was a new book of the Bible
One does not simply sing a Jim Steinman song, one must ring a Jim Steinman song from the Earth much as King Arthur pulled the fabled sword from the stone; One must wield a Jim Steinman song as Captain America wielded Thor’s hammer at the end of “Avengers: Endgame”
Quoting Meat Loaf: " You can’t just have a great voice and sing a Jim Steinman song, you have to become a Jim Steinman song; you have to be the song; you don’t sing the song, you are the song

Céline and Jim

Céline sings Steinman’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me.” I think through Harvilla’s theory, it’s this preparation that makes her ready to sing MHWGO, she learns here, how to be the song. And because it is her and she is it, they are 2 times F5 hurricanes making landfall.

Céline

… sings her songs
- …like they owe her money
- … like she’s a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm
- … like she’s Marshawn Lynch … in the NFC playoffs…against the New Orleans Saints
- … as if the listener were Sisyphus and she were the boulder
- … as if she’s going to make the whole world cower in the storm cellar
The greatest compliment I can pay her is that she turns every song she sings into a Jim Steinman song.

Amazing.

Now this is a standout episode, but other episodes (more than 60, in fact 120!) range in coverage from hip-hop, to fad, to metal. The essays are beautifully constructed (as I’ve described above), but sometimes there are insights that just slap you in the face like a trout thrown by Lew Zealand: “Pantera is a band from Texas that plays metal. But really they’re a boogie band. And that’s not surprising, Texas is home to…in my mind: holy shit they’re metal ZZ Top…ZZ Top.”

I would say no episode is without some staggeringly good insight about how a song sounds, was written, or feels.

Lauren bought me his abridged book that covered the 60 songs, but seriously, Rob, just give us the full essays, dude. Most every trope, word, or exegesis is worth reading. Or perhaps Barb Harvilla, mother to Rob, who makes humorous appearances in the show and the tour of the show: Please ask Robby to find a publisher to publish the essays in their full form. ❤️

Footnotes

This actually is probably my second-most favorite because of the pull-quotes Rob reads off which actually cause him to break into unplanned laughter that’s so sweet and good-natured about a really heinous comment. You are walking, living, breathing cheese.
You know that someone is a big thing when the only adjective to describe the noun that points to them is that noun, but as an adjective