Strawberry Letter 23

"Strawberry Letter 23" occupies a space that very few songs manage to reach: it sounds like a memory of something that may not have actually happened. Shuggie Otis recorded it in 1971 at twenty years old, and the track carries a kind of dreaming adolescent sensibility that was never entirely punk or entirely pop or entirely psychedelic but drew from all three wells. The production is layered with unusual textures — kalimba, backward tape effects, strings that seem to drift rather than support — and the overall sound is humid and slightly unfocused in a way that feels entirely deliberate. Otis's guitar work throughout is understated, more interested in color than statement, and his voice has a reedy, almost narcoleptic quality that makes the song feel like something you're overhearing from another room. The lyrical content is love letter as altered state — correspondence that has become so charged with feeling it transforms into hallucination. The song was a modest success when Otis released it but became a classic in 1977 when the Brothers Johnson covered it and pushed it to number five on the pop charts. The original, however, is the more interesting document: rawer, stranger, less finished, and exactly as long as it needs to be. It is music for late afternoon light through half-closed blinds, for the specific wistfulness of wanting something you cannot quite name.