The Number 1 Song In Heaven

Not the single version. I’m talking about the seven-minute album cut that sounds like two completely different takes set end to end.

This song epitomizes the words “synth pad”, with that lovely, warm, firework-fallout hum, it feels like the inside of a confirmed bachelor pad, a mid-century modern ottoman, purple upholstery, big enough for three to share comfortably with half a dozen throw pillows. All natural lighting. Fireplace.

The brothers Spark, known for their everchanging style and assiduous avant-garde credentials, partnered with Giorgio Moroder for this track. Moroder, the Father of Disco, who helped define electronic dance music, makes magic here. Even in the late 70s, long after the Beatles’ breakup, synthesizers were still functionally new. So much of their sonic landscape was unexplored. This mechanical music was almost alien, yet Moroder and Sparks make it sound so obvious and natural. Like this was always how music was meant to be made.

Much of our (my) layman’s experience of music can be chalked up to the historical revisionism of hindsight and nostalgia, but there’s something wonderfully timeless about this ‘79 time capsule. The song’s first half, drifts along on twinkling radio-waves, a marching band snare roll, and Russell Mael doing his best impression of a voice from Above. It’s a song you could theoretically fall asleep (or die) to. It’s such a 70s vision of the pearly gates: the warm, halogen lamplight of waking up in an all-white waiting room. Maybe our visions of the afterlife haven’t evolved much. Maybe our idea of what we ultimately want in eternity is socially circumscribed. Maybe we do want the same things. Reassurance.

Mael lyrics are so coy:

I love how he tinges the excitement of eternal life with the ironic grin of death. Like, hey, let me let you in on a little secret: the afterlife has some real bangers on rotation, oh by the way, a bus might be fixing to mow you down right now. Maybe! Can’t say for sure!

Then you pass through the gates and it sounds like the song is ending. The drums shake the room. One could imagine the tempo change and floor-tom roll marks a descent into a more hedonistic hellish scene. How can Heaven hold such a feverish dancefloor?

The second half is the single version, and understandably so. Every aspect of the first half is turned up to twelve, and it’s such a jolt to hear what felt like a lifetime’s lullaby transformed into a rollicking dancebeat. Mael’s falsetto is heavenly, not that it’s necessarily pleasant, but that he’s reaching almost ear-piercing levels. I dare your spine not to shiver as he runs his voice all the way up his range to proclaim, “Gabriel plays it—God how he plays it!—Gabriel plays it. Let’s hear him play it!” Immediately following that wild run, the synths breakdown, spiraling like a machine running out of steam. It lends the song that Mario-Star-Powering down desperation, like oh shit, it’s all coming apart!

It’s such a brilliant shtick, the contrast of high and low, and plays up the duo’s stage-personas: Russell the flamboyant voice, and Ron the stony scowler. The duality of the song’s structure is the power of the brothers writ large. They can make a minor key movement sound ecstatic, and a major lift utterly hair-raising.

In the final movement:

Another dazzling display of duality. The wry self-indictment of popular music as a capitalist cash grab, sweetly paired with the idyllic child-choir-to-be. If one could commodify the sound of seraphic serenity, they’d sell that shit til it went out of style. And child choirs have always made me cagey—always seem calculated and creepy. Yet there’s a roundabout present in this last verse. Sure those sounds of divinity get filtered through the sausage churn, but eventually someone small and unjaded reclaims them.

A mainstay of the cult circuits for almost fifty years now, they’re no strangers to the uncertain afterlives of songs once they leave the recording studio. Art is the artists until it’s not. Who knows, maybe you’ll hear this song someday in a used bookstore and think of me. We’d all like to be remembered.

Right?