999,837: Shawn Lane — Get you Back

Listening to the theme song to most any hour-long television drama, one is often struck by how the producers, in an attempt to engineer music that appeals to everyone, have created something that appeals to nobody. It's odd how a kind of music, focus-grouped to within an inch of mercy to give Melrose Place an everyman appeal delivers a peculiar style of sound which does not, in fact, have any real-world corollary. It certainly suggests rock music. All the parts are there, save for everything that matters, as though an alien from Venus has decided to give rock music a go after only reading a detailed description of the form written by an alien from Mars. In other words, nobody in possesion of a beating human heart listens to the theme to LA Law and thinks, "God! where can I get a whole album of THAT."

But then, that can't be true. A short trip to any foreign land is proof enough that every horrible kind of music has it's audience, and such is apparently the case with the vanishingly smooth sounds of the network television drama. As evidence I give you Shawn Lane.

To be clear, Shawn Lane didn't actually write television jingles. Rather, the sound of the mid-ninties television jingle is simply where his muse took him. He was a driven independant musician who spent his too short life lovingly crafting with passion the kind of glistening schmatz that has led legions of dead-eyed Hollywood session men to hard drugs.

I only know about his existence because I had a subscription to Guitar World magazine in high school. This magazine acts as a portal between our world and a world were the likes of Slash, Kurt Cobain and The Edge stand shoulder to should with the likes of Allan Holdsworth, Eric Johnson and Al Di Meola. I was reading "GW" back in the days when you had to purchase your music before you could listen to it, and since none of these guys were on the radio or Mtv I'd end up buying a lot of albums simply because I wanted to hear what "Shawn Lane's masterful avalanche of cascading notes" sounded like. Thus I found my curiosity satisfied completely by Lane's solo debut "Powers of Ten" or as I liked to call it "Power Soften".

Listen to to Shawn play his crowd-pleaser "Get You Back" live before what we can only assume was an actual crowd. This song is like Harry Hamlin's magnificent jawline translated directly into notes...thousands and thousands of notes. Whoever Lane needed to "get back" I'm sure it was mission accomplished. If she wasn't won over by buttery main riff which dominates the first two minutes, then perhaps he had her with the following breakdown, built on a series of key changes terraced like the snowy tiers of a wedding cake. If not that then the next section, where the softer side of Shawn takes over, must certainly have sent the titular "you" collapsing nude into Shawn's arms in a sexual frenzy. Or perhaps it was the four minute outro solo culminating in a masterful cascading note avalanche which sealed the deal?

But I suppose it doesn't matter. Whether or not Shawn won back that wandering heart, the song endures to delight another generation of curious guitar twiddlers. It is a moment frozen on time, a document of music, as music was never supposed to sound.

Get You Back - Shawn Lane