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Song of the Day #976: ‘Side of the Road’ – Beck

Three albums of the twenty I’m featuring in this series are what I would call heartbreak records. They stem from and focus on the end of a relationship. The first is Beck’s 2002 Sea Change.

This album represented a major stylistic and lyrical shift for Beck, whose previous work blended hip-hop, funk and folk-rock and featured absurdist hipster poetry. Sea Change was a mostly acoustic affair with straightforward lyrics about love and loss. And despite all of the inventive ground-breaking music he’d released to that point, it felt immediately like the best thing he’d ever done.

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Song of the Day #975: ‘The Scarlet Tide’ – Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello missed a shot at an Oscar nomination for his song ‘God Give Me Strength,’ co-written with Burt Bacharach for the 1996 film Grace of My Heart. That song is a thing of beauty, far superior to the schlock that wound up nominated (though I am a fan of ‘That Thing You Do,’ the Adam Schlesinger-penned title track from that Tom Hanks film).

But the Academy made up for their oversight eight years later by nominating today’s track, ‘The Scarlet Tide,’ which Costello wrote for the film Cold Mountain. He didn’t win (the award went to some forgettable tune from Return of the King, piling on to that film’s sweep) but he did get the chance to perform, with Alison Krauss, in front of one of his largest audiences ever.

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Song of the Day #974: ‘Country Darkness’ – Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello followed up the disappointing North just a year later, with 2004’s The Delivery Man. And where North felt stilted and mannered, the new album was bursting with energy.

Another of Costello’s half-baked concept albums, The Delivery Man purports to be the story of the title character and his relationships with three different women. Those women are played on the album by Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris, each of whom duets on at least one track. The narrative is really quite flimsy, though, as if Costello abandoned the idea midway through recording.

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Song of the Day #973: ‘Dinner at Eight’ – Rufus Wainwright

I’ve described so many of these albums as ‘Desert Island Discs’ already that I fear I might have already reached my limit. If that’s the case, I’d have to kick something out the make room for Rufus Wainwright’s 2003 album Want One.

This is a record I’ve described as my favorite ever, though I’ve also bestowed that title on Paul Simon’s Graceland and Ben Folds Five’s debut album. At any rate, it’s in the running, definite top five material.

(As an aside, I won’t be featuring the Ben Folds Five debut during this series because I explored it in full late last year, dedicating a day to each of its 12 tracks. But rest assured, it belongs on any list of my favorite albums and it is represented here in spirit).

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Song of the Day #972: ‘Dry Town’ – Miranda Lambert

Following a string of older albums, I’m now featuring the second most recent record on this list. And it’s the newest to me, as I discovered it only a little more than a year ago.

Miranda Lambert’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was released in 2007, two years after her debut album, Kerosene. It received universal critical acclaim of the sort that would have caught my attention but for the fact that it was about a country album. In 2007, that was a non-starter for me.

But as I’ve thoroughly documented on this blog, I started coming around to country music over the past couple of years and at the end of 2009, my conversion was complete thanks to Brad Paisley’s American Saturday Night and this album.

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