The lead-off track of Belle & Sebastian’s 1998 album The Boy With the Arab Strap, ‘It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career’ is a classic example of the band’s early style. I’ll stack the music on B&S’s first three albums against pretty much anything ever.
Nobody does acoustic melancholy like the Scottish septet. They later expanded their sound, branching into pop and even dance music quite successfully, but for me this will always be the quintessential Belle & Sebastian sound.
In the year of A Star is Born and an inevitable Best Actress nomination for Lady Gaga, it’s a little wild to get served up this track from her 2011 album Born This Way.
Gaga has had one of the most interesting and surprising career trajectories ever. From techno pop and avant garde performance art to Tony Bennett duets, soft rock and award-season movie roles.
Brad Paisley has written some of the best love songs I’ve ever heard. ‘Then,’ ‘Little Moments,’ ‘She’s Everything,’ ‘The World,’ the list goes on and on.
So it’s a shame that today’s track, from Paisley’s 2017 album Love and War, doesn’t live up to its predecessors. It sounds to me like somebody trying to write a Brad Paisley love song but not quite hitting the mark.
I suppose it’s appropriate that, after so many recent posts about movies, the Random iTunes Fairy served up a song from another movie.
‘Gold’ appeared in the lovely 2007 film Once, and later in the successful Broadway adaptation of the film. I first assumed this was a performance by the film’s leads, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, but apparently it is actually by an Irish band called Interference.
Here’s a lovely track from Elvis Costello’s 2004 album The Delivery Man, which started as a concept album about a quartet of characters in the deep south but ended up as a collection of loosely connected rock songs and ballads.
Ivy was presumably one of the characters in that original narrative, and her presence is felt in the backing vocals of the wonderful Emmylou Harris, who shows up on a couple of tracks. Lucinda Williams sits in on the raucous ‘There’s a Story in Your Voice,’ delivering a wild and passionate performance.
Meet Me In Montauk 