My Top 1000 Songs #856: Big White Cloud

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Having checked in with Lou Reed a couple days back, we pivot to his Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale (ok, we just heard from him as well) for this gorgeous, epic ballad. It's off his fantastic 1970 solo debut, Vintage Violence, and more than anything on that album immediately established that Cale had a lot of interesting tricks up his sleeve, about as far removed from the chaotic experimental cacophony of White Light/White Heat (his final proper LP with the VU) as one could imagine.

The song's quiet beauty, a slow-burning piano-based atmospheric piece, full of swoony orchestration, establishes a template Brian Eno would build on a few years later (the song seems to directly influence the title track of Eno's 1974 Taking Tiger Mountain), making their intermittent partnership over the years seem obvious. The song's cinematic scope makes it something you'd imagine playing behind film credits (apparently it was put to use on the last season of The Bear, so that's pretty cool).

Check out this incredible live cover by Zella Day!

The Jayhawks give it an Americana-infused spin: