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Song of the Day #926: ‘The First to Leave’ – Elvis Costello

Two years after Mighty Like a Rose, Elvis Costello took his biggest musical detour yet, releasing an album recorded with the backing of The Brodsky String Quartet.

1993’s The Juliet Letters wasn’t a pop album with strings, it was a suite composed for strings and vocals. And if Costello’s voice sometimes had to strain to hit the operatic notes he composed, so be it.

Costello got the idea to write an album of correspondence after hearing a story about a professor in Verona who took it upon himself to answer the many letters still addressed to Shakespeare’s Juliet that reach the Italian town. That story gave the album its title, though the Juliet connection shows up on just a couple of songs. The rest take the form of letters of one sort or another, including a piece of junk mail.

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Song of the Day #925: ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’ – Billy Joel

My family and I play this game where we line up movies, songs or musicians into a college hoops-style bracket (OK, I line up the brackets) and vote on a series of matchups until you narrow things down to a final face-off.

So a Steven Spielberg game might see Jaws up against Always in an early round (an easy pick for most people, I imagine) then advancing to face Schindler’s List in round two (maybe not as easy a pick, though I’d still go with Jaws).

We played this game using Billy Joel songs once and after a drawn-out battle, our final two were both tracks from Joel’s classic 1977 album The Stranger — ‘Vienna’ and ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.’

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Song of the Day #924: ‘I’m Waiting For the Day’ – The Beach Boys

Along the same lines as yesterday’s Liz Phair post, I’m featuring The Beach Boys today because I’m surprised I haven’t done so more often.

That’s probably because I just don’t have much to say about The Beach Boys. In fact, I started to write about how when I was younger I didn’t know The Beach Boys were such a big deal, artistically. I thought they were a surf band on a par with The Monkees or some other gimmicky bunch of pretty boys like that.

Then I looked back at the first time I featured a Beach Boys song on the blog (‘Don’t Worry Baby’ way back at Song of the Day #26) and these were my first words in that post: “I remember when I didn’t know The Beach Boys were a big deal.”

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Song of the Day #923: ‘Polyester Bride’ – Liz Phair

When preparing the songs for this week, I was shocked to see that I’ve featured Liz Phair only once on the blog to date.

That was more than two years ago when I chose ‘Stratford-On-Guy’ as Song of the Day #115.

It’s not that Liz Phair plays such a major role in my music collection that her absence on the blog is a surprise, it’s just that as I approach 1,000 songs of the day, I figured somebody like her would have at least found her way into two or three posts.

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Song of the Day #922: ‘Queen of the Supermarket’ – Bruce Springsteen

I suppose when you’ve had a career as long, varied and successful as that of Bruce Springsteen, there comes a time when you feel like you can do anything you want.

And in Bruce’s case, on his 2009 album Working On a Dream, he decided what he wanted to do was write a song about falling in love with a supermarket checkout girl.

Being Bruce Springsteen, he wrote the most poetic song about falling in love with a supermarket checkout girl that you can imagine. He has made a living telling the tales of regular folks in florid language more worthy of a short story than a song, and this track is no exception.

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