But that’s a strength that derives from its graceful, old-fashioned melody, and the way the virtuoso lyric glories in the pleasures of witty metaphor and scabrous innuendo. This wry treatise on female sexual disappointment, co-written, perhaps significantly, by Alex Turner and his ex-girlfriend Johanna Bennett, could be about a woman who settled down too young at 23 or one who has hit a midlife crisis at 43. Those lines would deepen further over the drug-addled next decade, before Tyler’s dreams were finally fulfilled by global popularity in 1987. Still only in his mid-20s, but frustrated by a lack of momentum in his music career, Steven Tyler displayed a Jackson Browne-esque level of maturity-before-his-time when he sang “Every time that I look in the mirror/ All these lines on my face gettin clearer” in Aerosmith’s anthemic debut single from their first album. It was so far ahead of its time when originally recorded in 1969 that Studio One’s legendary producer Coxsone Dodd rejected it, leaving the song unreleased until the vocal trio formed their own label two years later. Partially sung in Amharic (the title translates as “give praise”), it’s a minor-key classic of close harmonies and the traditional Rastafarian longing for repatriation.
Satta Massagana is one of the most covered tunes in the history of reggae and a rare instance of a song that crossed over into church groups rather than the other way round.
