Dr. Fuji and Henry Charleston (Zoom Variation)

If you ever needed proof that Robert Pollard's melodies are strong enough for Muzak, "Dr. Fuji and Henry Charleston (Zoom Variation)" is exhibit A. Pollard obviously liked the song "Zoom" enough to take another crack at it, this time as an instrumental with Doug Gillard offering some very tasteful, very elaborate lead guitar over Pollard's strumming. The result is a short, catchy track that emphasizes the strong hook of the original song and offers further proof of the malleability of Pollard's work. It's also unneeded testament to Gillard's guitar prowess, something that makes one hope for further collaborations between these two.

Zoom (It Happens All Over The World)

According to a note by Robert Pollard confrere Rich Turiel on the Guided by Voices Database, "Zoom" began life as the song "White Skin and Bone," demoed during the Earthquake Glue era. While it was smart to keep the song off of that album where it would have been a very odd fit, Pollard's instincts proved to be even better when it came to finding a final home for the track. Turiel noted that it would probably surface on the Suitcase II boxed set. That would have been a mistake, for it would have buried one of Pollard's strongest post-GBV tracks amid 99 other songs of widely varying quality.

Instead, he wisely gave it its own release, issuing it as the key track on the titular Zoom EP. It was the first post-GBV solo release from Pollard, and this song in particular showed his songwriting skills were as sharp as ever. It's a throwback of a track, sounding like an early '60s folk pop chestnut. The song has a slightly swinging tempo and quiet instrumentation, the mid-fi recording giving it a sound not unlike something coming in on a transistor radio's AM dial.

Pain as it grows, where did you go, baby I don't know.
White skin and bone, love is all alone baby you should know.

Pollard strums guitar while his recently dismissed GBV bandmates Doug Gillard and Kevin March back him on bass and drums, respectively. The three offer backing vocals on the closing tag, singing "It happens all over the world" as Pollard sings about being abandoned by a lover, admitting that "Even the birds cry. Every part hurts, even my toes hurt." Now that's heartbreak, rarely rendered so sweetly.

Have a Day Mr. Clay

Released in Feburary 2005, Robert Pollard's EP Zoom was the first shot in his post-Guided by Voices solo career. Coming six months after the last GBV release, Half Smiles of the Decomposed, and just two months after the band hung it up at a New Year's Eve show in Chicago, the disc was an eagerly awaited look at Pollard without his band. As such, it was a strange little collection, a retro-sounding four-song single based mostly on acoustic guitar.

Two of the four songs were recorded by Chris Slusarenko, GBV's latter-day bassist and Pollard's collaborator in the Takeovers. On "Have a Nice Day Mr. Clay," Slusarenko captures Pollard accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and maracas, singing a sweet ditty in 3/4 time -- "I'm gonna come out to see about you" --that morphs after 15 seconds into a frantic little 4/4 pop song and then back again. Slusarenko offers hard-to-hear bass accompaniment, and then it's over, all within 1:15. But, as is often the case with Pollard, things are not that simple.

For the final minute of the song, we hear a recording of a conversation between a female artist from Frankfurt and a questioner (it almost sounds like Pollard himself, slowed down). The artist is asked about her work, and when she says that some of her work is conceptual, she is asked to define the term: "It means that there are a lot of things that are appropriated, a lot of things being retooled in new ways. A lot of things that deal with history, the different stories are retooled..." That sounds a lot like Pollard's work, not only with the collage art that graces most of his album covers, but with the songs themselves as he takes the best bits from his own work and filters them through the sounds of his beloved late 60s-early 70s bands to create something at once familiar and new.