And so we reach the end of my 11-day discovery of Courtney Barnett’s album, Sometimes I Sit and Thing, and Sometimes I Just Sit. As I suspected, the final song on the album is a short one, juxtaposed with the nearly 7-minute epic that preceded it.
No clue what it will sound like (yet) and based on the blend of styles on the album so far, I’m not sure I can even venture an educated guess.
This track, from Annie Lennox’s 1995 hit covers album Medusa, is the odd song out on that record.
The lineup features renditions of cuts by Paul Simon, Procol Harum, Bob Marley, Al Green, Neil Young, The Clash and The Temptations. And ‘Downtown Lights’ by Blue Nile.
What the hell is Blue Nile, you ask? Good question. They are a Scottish band that has moderate success with this song in 1989. And by “moderate success” I mean it reached #67 on the UK charts.
Here’s a lovely track from one of Lyle Lovett’s best albums, 1989’s Lyle Lovett and His Large Band.
This album picked up where Lovett’s Pontiac left off, splitting its focus between traditional country, jazz and blues. ‘Nobody Knows Me’ falls in the album’s second half with the rest of the country songs.
The penultimate song on Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit is another long one. ‘Kim’s Caravan’ clocks in at 6 minutes and 45 seconds. The last epic, ‘Small Poppies,’ earned its running time through some inspired electric blues guitar work. I wonder if this one will mine similar territory.
Lyrically, this is a pretty straight-forward song about the environment, though told in what I’ve come to recognize as Barnett’s casual, mundane-is-profound approach.
I’m coming in to the home stretch of Courtney Barnett’s album with three songs left, starting with track #8, ‘Debbie Downer.’
This is a weird way to discover an album, one song at a time spaced out over hours or days. I’ve written some of these blog entries back-to-back but others have been separated by a day or two. I’m used to hearing new music all the way through, usually on my car stereo. This is a more disjointed experience, certainly, but I also feel like I’m getting a better sense of the album overall than I usually do with a new record.
