Blues Is King. Marshall Crenshaw. 1985. Warner Bros.

 Certain recording artists—Lindsey Buckingham, Lucinda Williams, Sylvester Stewart all come to mind—share such a deep affinity with American music that it can seem as if they’ve walked into our  fantasies of democracy and produced their best work from inside that dream. So it is with Marshall Crenshaw. His eponymously titled debut record was released in 1982, when American artists were engaged in a Janus faced dialogue with their audience; on one side, artists like Talking Heads, Prince, and Laurie Anderson boldly envisioned pop song dynamics that bore the irreducible stamp of their respective personalities, while on the other side, Los Lobos, the Replacements, and the Cramps refashioned the face of rock and roll itself to accurately mirror the tastes of a young public growing increasingly hostile to, as well as alienated from, the social and fiscal policies of a federal government that was becoming less and less representative. Somewhere between the two norms fell the music of Marshall Crenshaw. His talent was to wed, with boy genius precision, Beach Boys’ American youth mythos to pre-psychedelic Byrds’ guitar jangle, and his work argued sensibly—at either low or full volume, in other words—for the legacy of American pop as recorded, unofficial history of teenage sexuality. In 1985 Crenshaw released Downtown, his third record, and on its best track, Blues Is King, produced by Mitch Easter, you hear how far maturity had taken the singer/songwriter. Lyrically, the song’s theme is loneliness, especially in its end stage, when its hold on the body has weakened enough for you to begin to see the world around you with renewed vision, its beauty now an almost pathological construct, the negative imprint of its natural state. Musically, the song’s performed in a minor key, the key of sympathy and melancholy, but there’s no point in the song where Crenshaw and his backing band—including Easter and his Let’s Active band mate Faye Hunter on bass—risk losing momentum with missteps into inchoate sentimentality; verse after verse the band makes its way back to the rhythmic provocation of its original conception, the daring conceit that, because of the transcendent power of American blues—the song title is a reference to a live album released by B.B. King in 1967–remnants of our industrialized world’s natural beauty are refracted across a multiplicity of perspectives accessible from uniquely personal, oblique angles. The human soul reveals its secrecies at 45 rpm.