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Song of the Day #951: ‘Prairie Wedding’ – Mark Knopfler

I have a lot of one-off albums in my collection that I love despite not owning anything else by the artists who recorded them. Albums such as k.d. lang’s Absolute Torch and Twang, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and The Afghan Whigs’ 1965, to name just a few.

In most cases, I’ve sampled other work by those artists and decided it wasn’t really my thing. But on that one album, they tapped into something special and earned a spot in my heart, and on my CD shelf, forever.

Now that I think about it, those albums are probably worth a theme week of their own. Stay tuned.

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Belated thoughts on the Grammys

I realize few people care about the Grammys as they’re occurring, let alone three days later, but I’ve been meaning to jot down a few impressions I got from the annual ceremony.

The Grammys are more of an all-star concert event and a marketing vehicle for the recording industry than an awards show, and that’s part of what makes them so fun. This year’s show didn’t have many particularly memorable moments but it did manage to entertain and sometimes infuriate.

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Song of the Day #950: ‘Essence’ – Lucinda Williams

I’m very excited. I got an email the other day advertising a pre-order sale of the new Lucinda Williams album, Blessed. It’s due out on March 1.

This will be Williams’ fifth album in ten years, which is pretty impressive for a woman who put out only four albums in the 20 years prior to that.

Around the turn of the millennium, she shook off the perfectionism that made her spend 6 years on Car Wheels On a Gravel Road and started churning out records that were rougher around the edges.

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Song of the Day #949: ‘Cathy’s New Clown’ – John Wesley Harding

It’s appropriate that I’m featuring a John Wesley Harding song in the midst of my Elvis Costello weekends. The poor man has been compared to Costello so often for so many years… why should he escape that here?

Of course being compared to Elvis Costello is quite a compliment, so I doubt he’s complaining. And he did hire most of The Attractions to back him on his best album, Here Comes the Groom, so it’s not like he doesn’t invite the comparison.

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Song of the Day #948: ‘Gracie’ – Ben Folds

Today is the 5th birthday of my younger daughter, Fiona. Yes, she was born on Valentine’s Day… cue all the comments about how sweet that is.

I figured it was appropriate to pull out the mack-daddy of father/daughter songs today. I have a few others I love (and I promise to feature one on June 20, my other daughter’s birthday) but ‘Gracie’ by Ben Folds is the one song to rule them all.

Appearing on Folds’ Songs for Silverman, this is one of the songs that caused fair-weather fans to dismiss him as soft. Those morons hadn’t been paying much attention to the rest of his career.

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