‘Clean Money’ is an outtake from Elvis Costello’s album Armed Forces. It was later reworked with portions of its lyrics ending up in the song ‘Love For Tender,’ the lead-off track of his next album, Get Happy!!.
In this form, the song was at one point the opening track of Armed Forces, as Costello explains in the voluminous liner notes of the deluxe edition.
The Random iTunes Dairy has been reading the blog again. How else can we explain today’s “random” selection from The Shins’ album Port of Morrow just two days after I sang its praises?
This is the title track and the album’s final song, and it has a much more ethereal quality than the rest of the record. James Mercer sings in a falsetto reminiscent of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.
My only association with this Ellie Goulding song, from her 2010 debut album Lights, is my impersonation of its opening lines. My wife was (is?) a fan of this album, while I would pass up no chance to make fun of it.
My schoolyard taunts included saying Goulding sounds like a “wispy unicorn,” mocking her pronunciation of “this love” as “this loaf” and singing the beginning of this song as “a toy a too a tee a toe” in my best Ellie Goulding accent.
Badly Drawn Boy’s 2000 debut album, The Hour of the Bewilderbeast, remains a remarkable collection of baroque pop and acoustic loveliness with a level of quality that Damon Gough sadly hasn’t approached since.
Admittedly, I haven’t kept up with everything he’s released over the past 17 years (which includes a couple of movie soundtracks and five more studio albums) but the few I do have pale in comparison to this beauty of an album.
I’m currently digging into the albums of 1990, and I’m not very impressed with the selection.
Today’s Random iTunes Weekend selection is a reminder that 1980 was a much stronger year. So strong that Talking Heads’ Remain in Light managed only the third slot on my personal list of favorite 1980 albums.
Only Billy Joel’s Glass Houses (#2) and Elvis Costello’s Get Happy! (#1) topped it, and the Billy Joel pick is a sentimental one. Remain in Light probably deserves the second spot.
Meet Me In Montauk 