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Song of the Day #962: ‘The Stranger’ – Billy Joel

Over the next four weeks I’m going to feature songs from 20 of my very favorite albums. I consider all of these albums essentially perfect — no bad songs, nothing skip-worthy, a consistent excellence from start to finish.

Plenty of my favorite artists have failed to craft an album worthy of this list. You won’t see anything by R.E.M., The Beatles or Belle and Sebastian in this series, for example. It’s not that they haven’t released albums I find meaningful or even transcendent — they absolutely have — but some of those albums feature a song or two that pale in comparison to their surroundings.

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Song of the Day #961: ‘Episode of Blonde’ – Elvis Costello

When I Was Cruel is full of great, off-kilter songs, from the title track (which samples a vocal snippet from a French song in a loop), ‘My Little Blue Window’ (a track I’d call country only to be loudly contradicted by regular readers of this blog) and the blistering ‘Daddy Can I Turn This?,’ which got its title from the purported final words heard on the black box recording from a crashed plane in which the pilot’s child was accompanying him in the cockpit.

One of the oddest, and best, songs on When I Was Cruel is the late-album spoken-word diatribe ‘Episode of Blonde.’ Costello rips into this beauty like a beat poet on open-mic night, spewing the verses like acid.

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Song of the Day #960: ‘Spooky Girlfriend’ – Elvis Costello

Three years after his Burt Bacharach collaboration, Elvis Costello released 2001’s For the Stars, an album recorded with Swedish soprano Anne-Sofie von Otter. And there was a great disturbance in the Force, as hordes of Elvis Costello fans sighed and rolled their eyes.

Branching out into new musical directions is one thing, but when a one-time punk star puts out his second album of easy listening material that would fit nicely in your grandmother’s CD collection, there’s a problem.

When would Costello rock again?

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Winter’s Bone

I’m going to come one Black Swan short of seeing all of the ten Best Picture nominees before Sunday’s Academy Awards. I just scratched #9 off the list by watching writer-director Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone on DVD.

This is certainly the bleakest film of the bunch. Set in the Ozarks of southwestern Missouri, Winter’s Bone tells the tale of Ree Dolly, a tough 17-year-old girl raising her younger brother and sister on her own. Her meth-cooking father, Jessup, has left and her mother is an empty shell who sits in a chair and takes medication that does nothing to improve her nearly catatonic state.

One day “the law” shows up to inform Ree that her father has jumped bail after putting the family house up as collateral. If Jessup doesn’t show up for his hearing, their land will be taken away. So Ree sets out on a quest to find her father and save her family. In her way stands a wider circle of family — the hard, mean, drug-running inhabitants of the woods around her run-down farm.

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Song of the Day #959: ‘If Only’ – Hanson

No matter how secure you are in your musical taste, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s uncool to like certain things.

I believe the surest test of that coolness factor is how comfortable you’d be if you pulled up to a stoplight with your windows open and Song X blaring from your speakers then turned to your left and saw another driver (let’s say an attractive member of the opposite sex) looking back at you and getting an earful of your selected tune.

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