I realize few people care about the Grammys as they’re occurring, let alone three days later, but I’ve been meaning to jot down a few impressions I got from the annual ceremony.
The Grammys are more of an all-star concert event and a marketing vehicle for the recording industry than an awards show, and that’s part of what makes them so fun. This year’s show didn’t have many particularly memorable moments but it did manage to entertain and sometimes infuriate.
I’m very excited. I got an email the other day advertising a pre-order sale of the new Lucinda Williams album, Blessed. It’s due out on March 1.
This will be Williams’ fifth album in ten years, which is pretty impressive for a woman who put out only four albums in the 20 years prior to that.
Around the turn of the millennium, she shook off the perfectionism that made her spend 6 years on Car Wheels On a Gravel Road and started churning out records that were rougher around the edges.
It’s appropriate that I’m featuring a John Wesley Harding song in the midst of my Elvis Costello weekends. The poor man has been compared to Costello so often for so many years… why should he escape that here?
Of course being compared to Elvis Costello is quite a compliment, so I doubt he’s complaining. And he did hire most of The Attractions to back him on his best album, Here Comes the Groom, so it’s not like he doesn’t invite the comparison.
Today is the 5th birthday of my younger daughter, Fiona. Yes, she was born on Valentine’s Day… cue all the comments about how sweet that is.
I figured it was appropriate to pull out the mack-daddy of father/daughter songs today. I have a few others I love (and I promise to feature one on June 20, my other daughter’s birthday) but ‘Gracie’ by Ben Folds is the one song to rule them all.
Appearing on Folds’ Songs for Silverman, this is one of the songs that caused fair-weather fans to dismiss him as soft. Those morons hadn’t been paying much attention to the rest of his career.
I’ve said before that I like Elvis Costello doing country better than Elvis Costello doing almost anything else. And here’s another song that supports that opinion.
‘Starting to Come to Me’ is treated like a throwaway on All This Useless Beauty. It’s tucked away toward the end of the album, a rare upbeat track on a record full of portentous ballads. But this is the song that hit me first and has stayed with me more than any other on the album.
