Feels So Good

I was raised to the rhythm of 1190 KEX AM. I napped to Yusuf/Cat Stevens, sang Fleetwood Mac with my mom, and got my first lessons in amour from its late night call-in shows. KEX specialized in what we’d now describe as adult contemporary, and in my memory the station awakened much of 1980s northwestern Oregon with the Vaseline lilt of Herb Alpert’s 1979 instrumental hit “Rise.” I’m sure it was programmed mostly for the wordplay, but the tune also happens to be a sound painting in sunrise: A barely percolating groove gives way to Alpert’s trumpet, and a Phrygian melody, like the sun coming up from the horizon, into a major tonality, becoming neon bright as the song ends. Even as a child, “Rise” stood out from the rest of the era’s bland Laurel Canyon poetics because it replaced their banal lyrics about jilted love with something pure and strange: a sound without a story, a song without words.