I adored Walter Martin’s episode on Cheesy Music and Guilty Pleasures, but my mind organizes these things differently than his mind does. (By the way, if you don’t listen to the Walter Martin Radio Hour you are seriously missing out.) Some of the music he calls cheesy I think of as overly earnest or emotionally indulgent or saccharine — but not necessarily cheesy. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Bernard Williams, I think Walter suffers from a poverty of concepts.
For me, cheesiness is largely a sonic property: it’s a function of how a song is arranged and performed. So I think Walter is totally right to say that Elton’s “Daniel” and Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” are cheesy, because of the flutes + a chorusy electric piano in the former and the pulsing synths in the latter. But U2’s “With or Without You” isn’t cheesy! Good heavens, no. I mean, I think it’s a great song, and I don’t cringe at it one bit, but I get why Walter cringes at it a little: because of its intense earnestness and lyrical excess. But a song with a drum track that great can’t be cheesy.
Walter starts his show with “The Long and Winding Road,” which I think is probably saccharine in any arrangement but only cheesy when Phil Spector adds the strings. The strings on “Let It Be” are also cheesy, but without the strings it’s simply one of the greatest of pop sings.
Cheesiness for me is a function of vocal bad taste or (this is more common) instrumental excess: it’s a matter of gilding the lily, of pouring sugar on the ice cream. Once I listened to a recording of Aaron Copland rehearsing an orchestra for a performance of “Appalachian Spring,” and he told his string players to play dryly, not sweetly, because the music is already sweet enough. If he had let them lean into the vibrato and sweep, he’d have had a cheesy performance of his work.
I think maybe this is one reason why I like demos so much: no added cheese. An overly earnest or emotionally indulgent song can be great if the arrangement is suitably restrained. Dylan’s Blood in the Tracks is in many respects an emotionally excessive record, but the simplicity of the arrangements helps to make it not cringey but overwhelmingly powerful.
Even “Secret Garden” could, I think, be relatively cheese-free with a different arrangement. Springsteen’s love affair with synths in the Nineties was really a self-betrayal. Consider “Streets of Philadelphia,” an extremely earnest synth-heavy song. Listen to that original, and now listen to Waxahatchee’s cover of it: all she has to do is replace the synth with a Hammond organ and everything changes. Katie kills that vocal, also. That song did nothing for me until I heard her perform it.
Another example: Walter is right that “Downtown Train” is a weirdly cheesy song, given that it’s by Tom Waits — but that’s largely because it’s produced and arranged to sound like, I don’t know, maybe a Tom Petty song? Listen to this live version — a totally different beast. In fact, Waits specializes in songs that might well feel cheesy — or at best sentimental and overly earnest — if they were sung by someone with a normal voice in a normal pop arrangement. But when Tom sings “Take It With Me” it’s completely convincing, and deeply affecting. (By the way, the best commentary on Waits that I’ve ever read comes from Thom Yorke — scroll about 60% of the way down this page.)
And sometimes what you expect to be cheesy turns out not to be: see k. d. lang’s early album Shadowland for an example. This is an exercise in pure pastiche, as lang recreates the sound of Patsy Cline, using the Nashville String Machine and the Jordanaires, the whole apparatus. But it’s perfect: the arrangements suit the songs and the vocal performance right down to the ground. Buckle up your seat belt and listen to “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” if you want to know what I mean. Of course, lang is pretty much the finest singer in the world — there are great singers who don’t have great voices, and great voices belonging to people who don’t really know how to sing: lang has the best instrument and the best taste — but the arrangement is perfection. As I say: it ought to be cheesy but isn’t.
And when you’re done with that one, have some “Black Coffee.”
I should make my own playlists — subscribers to Walter’s Substack get playlists associated with his episodes — of songs that I think of as fitting these different categories. If I find time to do that I’ll post links on my micro.blog.
