Your building's on fire. You're exhausted. Luckily Björk is here

Although I'm very fond of Björk, and firmly in awe of her artistry, I've always found her about as sexy as Tinkerbell. The corkscrew hairdos and floppy swan outfits and the chin resting on the limp wrists, fingertips waving—I appreciate them all as theater, but they kind of disqualify her as crush material. But the photo above opens up other possibilities—possibilities that, as I'll explain farther down, have been there all along. Of course, I realize that the nude and natural Björk in this shot is as much a mask as this, or even this. But she inhabits it expertly, right down to the tongue and the laugh, which makes me think Björk—unlike that robot Madonna—is in on the secret, that the "big time sensuality" she sang about was real to her.

While she projects an image of a voracious, almost post-human creature out to consume the world (“I don’t know my future after this weekend, and I don’t want to!”), there is a tender, highly romantic strain in her work. She falls in love, which sounds like a simplistic statement, I know, but not everybody does. She gets weak in the knees; she crumbles—“unravels,” as one song has it. Her songs dwell in the fleeting but all-consuming stage when things get heavy. “Love is a two-way dream,” one of her songs goes.

My favorite Björk song in this mode is one of her least known. In “Come to Me” the love sounds unconditional; the only rule is to not talk about it—which means that the song, although addressed to another person, is never actually delivered to that person. Which brings up the weirdly lonely aspect of falling hard. It’s that extra dimension that gives Björk’s love songs their heft.

Every once in awhile I stumble upon some song that, even in the digital era of no unturned stones, has never been transcribed anywhere online—no chords, no tabs, nothing. You know what that means: I have to do it myself. (I also clean up the dirty dishes in my house that people leave lying around.) Playing this thing on guitar, I'm struck by the almost Spanish quality of its melody, something that doesn't come through at all in its rather spacey recording. I also have to confess to not knowing the name of the chord that comes after the second word in "You know that I adore you..." and has the effect of the floor suddenly dropping out from under you. You can just stay on the B-flat, that will "work," but I've found that lifting the finger off the first string creates a downshift essential to the tune.

And yet, I have no idea what the resulting chord is. I've looked everywhere for this chord, which in tabs would appear as 0333XX. I've asked no less than three of my more musicologically-astute friends what this chord could be, and they've told me it doesn't exist. I've tried to give it a name. But I've turned up nothing.

Come To Me
(Björk Guðmundsdóttir)

A--------------Bb
Come to me, I'll take care of you
A-----------Bb
Protect you; calm, calm down
A--------------------Bb
You're exhausted; come lie down
A------------------------------Bb
You don't have to explain, I understand

Instrumental: A Bb A Bb

Bb---------B?-------Am
You know that I adore you
Am---Bb----------Am-----Cmaj7-----F
You know that I love you
Fmaj7--------------C
So don't make me say it
C--------------------Bb
It would burst the bubble
Bb---------E-----E7
Break the charm

Jump off—your building's on fire
And I'll catch you, I'll catch you
Destroy all that is keeping you down
And then I'll nurse you, I'll nurse you
I'll touch you

You know that I adore you
You know that I love you
So don't make me say it
It would burst the bubble
Break the charm

END

How Can I Be Sure Of You

Harry Nilsson just might win the pure-talent sweepstakes, and there's evidence that this would-be Sunday child was even a hard worker (at sixteen he was already writing songs and supporting himself with a bank job). His catalog offers a trove of impeccably crafted works; but, perhaps due to a restlessness that was manifested most famously by a weakness for months-long binges with depressed ex-Beatles, he only achieved a sustained perfection once in his career—on his lone great album, Nilsson Schmilsson. One of the finest records of the '70s, it's tougher than Nilsson's earlier, occasionally somewhat twee, albums, but it has a drive and a sense of fun that his later albums mostly lacked (issued, as they were, during his long and sorrily inevitable decline). I'm not trying to write an all-encompassing Nilsson piece here, so you'll have to go elsewhere to read about his childhood or the Lost Weekend or his cursed London apartment. I'm just going to write about one song.

Nilsson's label, RCA, was not always supportive of him while he was alive, but they've been nicer about him since he's been dead. When they got around to reissuing Schmilsson in 2004, they unforgivably relocated the photograph of the inside of Harry's refrigerator—possibly the best back-cover-art in the history of pop records—to the inner booklet, but otherwise they got it right: the new edition of Schmilsson, in addition to improved sound and some good notes, has valuable bonus material, including an unused track from the Schmilsson sessions that I've become a little obsessed with: "How Can I Be Sure of You." I feel that it's a top-shelf, vintage Nilsson ballad (go ahead, listen to it), and yet, somehow, I'm the only person in the world who knows about it—a situation I kind of enjoy but feel I must correct.

While it has crossed my mind that the song is addressed to Dylan, who in 1971 was in the middle of a creative free-fall that was almost as traumatic for the rock masses as the Beatles' recent breakup—and, after all, it was Bob who broke the news about the sun not being yellow ("it's chicken")—I suspect the lyric isn't so much a veiled message as simply a bit sketchy, which may be why such a gorgeous song failed to make the album. Another reason the song went onto the scrap heap may simply be that it uses a C/Cadd9 intro and Nilsson had already deployed those chords in the opening to "The Moonbeam Song." The intro to his cover of "Without You" uses a similar device (albeit in the key of E rather than C). So "How Can I Be Sure" might have been deemed one song too many with a "major chord plus its add9" introduction for one album.

As the keeper of this excellent Nilsson site pointed out to me, Harry eventually returned to the song, reworking it into "Good for God," which appeared on his 1975 album Duit on Mon Dei. Take a listen and you'll see that the earlier lyric's verses have been turned into a god-is-dead dialogue, and the "always changing" chorus has been completely jettisoned in favor of a rather stock singalong section. The performance is rushed and ragged, and, despite the delirious atmosphere, not particularly fun. What I'm saying here is, he ruined the song. These things happen. It's not the first time I was excited by a great early draft, only to be deflated by the final product.

When I said I'm the only guy in the world who even knows "How Can I Be Sure of You," I was of course exaggerating: Nilsson fans are utter diehards, and I'm sure they all turned this particular stone over long ago. But my impression of its being undiscovered isn't based on just nothing. If you Google it, information on the song is almost nonexistent; and while you'll naturally find its lyric in a few places, there isn't a single set of tabs, chords, what-have-you for the song to be had, anywhere. I have now corrected this.

The transcription below is for guitar, although this is really more of a piano number, but the chords are correct, the pianists out there can easily adapt, and this is the only place on the entire Internet where you can learn this thing. Get it now, before RCA—or Saruman the Gray or Steamboat Willie or whoever owns the rights to Nilsson's songs these days—comes after me with a cease and desist order.

How Can I Be Sure Of You
(H. Nilsson)

Intro: C / Cadd9 / C / Cadd9 / C / Cadd9

C-----------G---------------C
The other day a friend of mine said
---------------Fm---------------G#
He said, the sun's not really yellow
--------------G-------------C
He said the sun is really red

C-----------G---------------------C
I said, My friend what do you mean?
----------------Fm-------------G#
You read that in some magazine
--------------------G--------------------C
Next thing you'll say the earth's not green

e -----------------
b ----------------
g ----------------
d ----------0-1--
a -- 0-2-3------
e 3--------------

[notes above]----------E-------E7
How can I be sure of you any more
----------------------------F
In a world that's always changing
--------Bb
Re - arranging
---------F-----------Bb
Always changing, changing

e 3-1-0----
b ------3-1
g ----------
d ----------
a ----------
e ----------
[landing on intro's C chord]

I said, My friend how do you do
And what you're saying isn't true
Next thing you'll say the earth is blue

He said, My friend you're in a dream
And things are never what they seem
No, things are never what they seem

Repeat chorus (How can I be...)

END