Rule #1 of pop songs is don’t make people wait around wondering what they’re supposed to feel, and “Yesterday Once More” follows & breaks this rule before its first four bars have passed. A piano strikes the same chord twice and then the Voice comes in: “When I was young, I’d listen to the radio/waitin’ for my favorite songs/when they played, I’d sing along/it made me smile.” The piano doubles up on the final chord of the phrase and a classically liquid ‘70s bass lopes into the fray. “Those were such happy times, and not so long ago/how I wondered where they’d gone,” continues Karen, her commitment to the lines as fierce in its own way as Johnny Rotten spitting out the opening lines of “Holidays in the Sun.” You can try to find some trace of ironic distance in her voice, if you like; certainly plenty of people have approached the subject of her singing as though the finding of such distance were a fait accompli. Here, we don’t hear it. What we do hear, and quite clearly, is the marching-band precision with which the keyboard and the ride cymbal join in, the song suddenly revealing the parts it had been hiding.