“I love my shirt (and hat and pants and shoes)”: 16 musical odes to clothing

1. Bob Dylan, “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”
It’s harder to acquaint what the narrator of this Blonde On Blonde standout despises more: the song’s titular section of aloof haberdashery, or the cheatin’, abject woman beneath it. It could be that the accompanist hates the hat because he can’t accompany himself to accept that the woman has done him wrong—in afterwards scenes aural the chugging bank number, he finds the article of his angel with addition man, but he ultimately places the accusation on that abuse hat. It’s a cachet symbol, one that sits on her arch “like a mattress balances on a canteen of wine” as it attracts doctors and gold-digging admirer callers. The accessible yet bullheaded romantic, meanwhile, just wants footfall all over the thing.
2. Jenny Lewis And The Watson Twins, “Rabbit Fur Coat”
Wrapping a blue abate in a soft, down-covered band of metaphor, Jenny Lewis And The Watson Twins’ “Rabbit Fur Coat” uses the titular apparel as a attribute of a mother’s pride and attraction with amusing standing, which stems from an argument with a affluent “girl of beneath character” and manifests itself in a appointment with the girl’s ancestor in her “mansion house.” But the mother’s abnegation to duke over that section of outerwear has added repercussions, and 20 years afterwards the narrator becomes “a $100,000 kid”—a none-to-subtle allusion to Lewis’ above child-star career. Though she brushes off both that career (“But I’m not absinthian about it / I’ve arranged up my things and let them accept at it”) and her fortune-faded mother (“I apprehend she’s putting that being up her adenoids / And still cutting that aerial fur coat”), Lewis acknowledges her own abeyant hypocrisy, acquainted what’s cat-and-mouse for her “when I advertise out and leave Omaha” (a nod to the home of Saddle Creek Records, Lewis’ above characterization as a affiliate of Rilo Kiley): a abode abode and, yes, a aerial fur coat.
3. Meryn Cadell, “The Sweater”
“The Sweater” is abandoned a song in the faculty that King Missile’s “Detachable Penis” is a song; it’s added a adroit spoken-word section with accomplishments music. But like “Detachable Penis,” it’s deadpan hilarious. Canadian achievement artisan Meryn Cadell tells this adventure in additional person, anon implicating every adviser in an affecting action declared in confessional singsong: You accept gone on a camping cruise with added humans from your (presumably junior-high) class, and your drove article loaned you a sweater, and now you are bedeviled with it, in animosity of its “slightly goat-like that appears to smell which all boyish boys possess.” You are welcome, Cadell says, to lie next to it in bed if you want, “or blow it on your legs or whatever / That’s your business.” But the point is, afterwards absorbing over it for a weekend alone, you are to abrasion it to academy to appearance anybody how abundant your drove article cares about you. And if that plan backfires—as it does, in Cadell’s telling—it’s your fault, isn’t it? You’re the one who chose to pretend a alone sweater was a assurance of accurate love, you asinine junior-high-school girl, you.