Chris Swanson’s Song of the Month:
Donnie & Joe Emerson “Baby”

With every song (or band) we have a relationship (some we have yet to meet), and with the best there is romance. Mystery is the driving force for romance. You trade a little mystery for every sweet tidbit of insight you gain. Yet some of those insights lead to deeper mysteries. And therein lies the magic of music. I cannot wait to get to the deeper mysteries of this song — which has dominated my headspace for the past month — Donnie & Joe Emerson’s “Baby“. It’s another gem I know very little about. Apparently (according to Aunt Google, at least) it’s a song that few people know much of anything about. It’s driving me (that great kinda) crazy and acts to reinforce my lifelong Quikrete-like embrace with arrested development. It makes me feel A-OK about living my life almost entirely saturated with music.

I hope you’ve hit play by now. 

Knowing next to nothing about Donnie & Joe, I’m left to construct my own mythology based on what breadcrumbs have been left behind. ”Baby” comes from the album Dreamin’ Wild, which was released in 1979 as the first (and most likely only) release on Enterprise and Co Records. It bears all the hallmarks of a privately-pressed LP and was most likely funded by the parents of young Donnie & Joe, who appear to be somewhere between bonin’ and votin’ ages. Much ado can be made of the earnestness (a cynic would call it cheesiness) of the record cover. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there.

A downtempo ballad, “Baby” is, it would seem, filled with soul.  Yet how in the hell could these two prom night casualties have anything that could be even remotely construed as soul? Isn’t soul — like wisdom — something you earn over time, as you meet timeless criteria that was written in the stars long before man’s beating heart had taken shape, before the philosophy of aesthetics & character had ever been articulated? I imagine that most of us hope that’s the case. But I’m not ready to bequeath such an honor to the brothers Emerson, whose teenage souls heard nary an alarm bell when they not only posed for the glamour shot with butterfly collar shirts unbuttoned halfway down their hairless chests, but then opted to immortalize themselves for all of history by actually choosing one of the shots as their LP cover.  From where does this soulful sound come?

Unless there’s some Milli Vanilli action going on, these guys may be simply illustrating that soul is an expression, a veneer. “Baby” is soulful because it mimics what we understand as sounding soulful. These two go-getters may have simply listened to their favorite records, targeted the most soulful word they could (”baby”) and repeated it over and over again (mumbling the rest of the words with abandon, while every once in a while throwing in a “makin’ love”,  ”moonlight” or “sandy beach”). And they totally nailed it. I’ve heard “Baby” over 70 times in the last month and it’s not getting tired.

(Thanks to Soul Sides for putting this on my radar.)

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in ever-soulful Bloomington, Indiana. Bone up on his previous entries on Van Morrison, Caroline Crawford, Dion and Mad Season.

Filed under: Chris Swanson  Donnie & Joe Emerson