‘Home’ is a track from Tim McGraw’s great album, Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors. Just about every song on this album is a winner.
The beginning of this song has always struck me as very similar to the opening notes of Elvis Costello’s ‘You Bowed Down.’ You can compare for yourself here.
I doubt the composers of this song copied Costello, and the notes aren’t exact anyway, but it has always distracted me.
One of the hazards of Random Weekends is that you can wind up with a snippet of a song that doesn’t work out of context.
Such is the case with today’s SOTD, ‘I Was Wrong,’ by Badly Drawn Boy. This minute-long track segues into its companion song, ‘You Were Right,’ which I featured on the blog more than five years ago.
Today’s selection, rounding out my top five desert island songs, fits nicely into the discussion in yesterday’s comment section.
Dana might argue that I’m closing out with an R.E.M. song because they are one of my favorite bands. I would counter that R.E.M. is one of my favorite bands because of this song (which I featured in its original form as SOTD #201).
In Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, my favorite novel, the protagonist Rob Fleming is obsessed with making lists. Lists about life, love and art — mostly about art.
At one point in the book he, as a record store owner, is asked to provide his top five favorite songs for a column in a local magazine. The prospect of having one of his lists set in stone and published for all the world to see scares him to death.
As with Ben Folds, the presence of Bob Dylan on this list of desert island songs was a no-brainer, but the specific song was the struggle.
I was tempted to go with a track from one of Dylan’s early albums — specifically The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or Bringing it all Back Home — because those are the records I devoured as a young teenager first discovering the Bard.
