OK, last week’s Random Weekend gave us a weird coincidence when a song from Brad Paisley’s first album was followed by a song from his second.
A week later, we get another twofer, with yesterday’s Belle and Sebastian track followed by this one today. I won’t even bother to calculate the odds of back-to-back weekends featuring a single artist. But they gotta be high.
‘The Wrong Girl’ sits right in the middle of Belle and Sebastian’s 2000 album, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, an unassuming little pop gem surrounded by more ambitious material.
This song has everything you want from a Belle and Sebastian tune: jaunty acoustic guitar, strings, a trumpet solo, lyrics about a lovelorn loser. It also lets band member Stevie Jackson take over for Stuart Murdoch on vocals, which he does a couple of times per album with great results.
In one of those weird Random Weekend coincidences, the Random iTunes Fairy has served up a song from Brad Paisley’s sophomore album the day after landing on one from his debut. The odds of a song from 2001’s Part II following yesterday’s selection were 1 in 1,010.
The mischievous Fairy chose to land on the corniest song on that album, and perhaps the corniest song in Paisley’s whole catalog.
Here’s a simple heartbreak track from Brad Paisley’s debut album, 1999’s Who Needs Pictures.
Listening to the song in preparation for this post, my first instinct was to offer it up for one of my favorite musical game shows: Dead or Dumped? Is this song about a man who broke up with his girlfriend/wife, or a man who suffered through her death?
My lord, has it really been 27 years since R.E.M. released Monster? I remember being taken aback by the volume and aggression of this album coming on the heels of 1992’s Automatic For the People, but mostly loving the results.
R.E.M. said they wanted to make a loud album after the mostly acoustic Out of Time and Automatic For the People, and Monster certainly fit the bill. Soaked in reverb, this mashup of glam rock and grunge sounds like nothing else in the band’s catalog, for better and worse.
