“If There Is Something” by Roxy Music

"If There Is Something" is the shape-shifter on Roxy Music's self-titled 1972 debut, a Bryan Ferry song that starts as a wink and ends as a heartache. It opens as jaunty mock-country, all honky-tonk piano and twangy guitar, with Ferry tossing off the vocal with a smirk. Then a riff starts bouncing between guitar and saxophone and Ferry comes back in at full fever.

The motifs circle round again, Andy Mackay often out front, before the whole thing dissolves into a finale where Ferry sounds wounded and wistful over a cushion of backing voices and a mellotron's taped violins. One reading hears three ages in it: a youth puzzling over love, grown-ups in the heat of it, the singer in old age remembering. A live take turned up later on Viva!, and Peter Sinfield produced the studio original with Andy Hendriksen engineering.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.