So why is Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
If you’re lucky, you have a few people in your life that you are just weirdly in sync with. One of those people for me is my man Lou, and the dynamic will often play out in the most hilarious ways.
Case in point: I was just starting to write this very piece, heralding the wildly eclectic and pop culture-drenched delights of Nilsson Schmilsson, when Lou instant messaged me a link to Chris Cornell covering “Jump Into the Fire.”*
* Lou is a big Soundgarden guy, but an even bigger Alice in Chains guy.
My response to him was to send a screenshot of my open Microsoft Word document along with my response, “That’s some spooky simpatico shit.”
Part of the backdrop is our shared reverence for a movie called Goodfellas.
It’s not just a movie we enjoy, and it’s not even just a movie that we love. That doesn’t nearly do it justice.
Goodfellas is like a holy cultural artifact for us – a Wiesguy Ark of the Covenant if you will – that is spiritually with us in body, mind, and spirit, and sometimes speaks through us without our even realizing it.
Anyway, if you’re a fan of the movie (even if you don’t speak of it in an Art as Holy Artifact With Earth-Altering Supernatural Powers manner), you’ll easily recognize the role that “Jump Into the Fire” plays in it.
The creeping paranoia*, the drugs, stashing the guns in your mother-in-law’s garage, and… family dinner. That gravy ain’t gonna stir itself, you know what I’m saying?
* And as Nirvana wisely notes, quoting Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.”
And then there’s the music, that jumping bass line, that super sounds of the ‘70s guitar riff, Harry Nilsson howling above it all about how we can make each other happy. Just incredible.
And then the really incredible thing is how different that song is from every other song on Nilsson Schmilsson, and then how every other song is also so very different than every other one as well.
“Gotta Get Up,” which became my favorite song on Nilsson Schmilsson thanks in part to its integral role* in the first season of Netflix’s Russian Doll, is a big, fun singer-songwriter triumph that’s powered by a sense of not taking itself overly seriously. It’s a great song that’s clearly having a great time being a great song, and there’s very few things about music that I enjoy more than that.
* Sweet birthday baby!
Oh, and it’s catchy. Catchy for days.
Gotta get up, gotta get out
Gotta get home before the mornin’ comes
What if I’m late? Gotta big date
Gotta get home before the sun comes up
Up and away, got a big day
Sorry, can’t stay, I gotta run, run, yeah
Gotta get home, pick up the phone
I gotta let the people know I’m gonna be late
If it’s not enough that a Nilsson Schmilsson song is featured in an Ark of the Covenant-level Martin Scorsese movie, it also has a song featured in an absolutely iconic Quentin Tarantino flick: Reservoir Dogs.
Both Tarantino and Scorsese are masters of leveraging music for maximum effect in their films, and Quentin often leverages offbeat and quirky tracks pulled out of the pop cultural dustbin of history so that they can be reexamined in new ways.
And man oh man, “Coconut” could not be more offbeat and quirky, a sort of Latin-flavored head trip that again proves the vast territories that Nilsson Schmilsson covers over its 10 tracks.
“Without You,” the most popular song on the album by far by way of Spotify (its 153 million+ streams as of this writing out paced the second place “Gotta Get Up” by over 120 million!) is a beautiful, completely straight ahead and earnest ballad.
Editor’s note: please ignore the date stamp on this piece. It was actually written on Sunday, May 1h, 1980 at approximately 6:55 a.m.
Some stats & info about Harry Nilsson – Nilsson Schmilsson
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Singer Songwriter, Album Rock, Rock Music, Pop Music, Soft Rock
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #281
- All Music’s rating – 4.5 out of 5 stars
- When was Nilsson Schmilsson released? 1971
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #186 out of 1,000
Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
Gotta get up, gotta get out, gotta get home before the morning comes.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.