It’s funny how some songs drift in and out of our good graces.
When Elvis Costello released 1996’s All This Useless Beauty, I loved every minute of it, including (perhaps especially) its opening track, ‘The Other End (of the Telescope).’
Years later the song started to get on my nerves, particularly due to one lyric toward the end in which Costello sings of putting “a bamboo needle on a shellac of Chopin,” as pretentious a phrase as he’s ever uttered.
The recent reelection of President Barack Obama has eaten away at my time, both personally and professionally, to a degree that has endangered my ability to post a new song each day.
I’m actually writing day to day right now, rather than having a week or so worth of blog entries built up as I usually do.
Today’s Random Weekend selection is similar to the Lucinda Williams track posted last Sunday — a raw, acoustic demo of an album cut.
In this case the performer is Elvis Costello and the song is ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’ from 1989’s Spike.
This is a song — in both its finished form and as a demo — with which I have lost patience over the years.
I’ve been simultaneously dreading and eagerly anticipating the chance to discuss Elvis Costello as part of the genome project.
Costello is basically a genome all to himself. It’s hard to think of a genre he hasn’t at least dabbled in, a musical inspiration he hasn’t explored on record.
Chamber music fans can claim him thanks to his work with the Brodsky Quartet. He’s a hero to the adult contemporary set thanks to his collaborations with Burt Bacharach and Sofie Van Otter, not to mention his marriage to Diana Krall.
The Random iTunes Fairy is stealing a bit of my thunder.
I had planned to feature Elvis Costello next week as part of my musical genome project, and perhaps I still might. But today’s song would have been a perfect selection to demonstrate Costello’s ‘Country Plus’ credentials. I’ll table that discussion until the appropriate time.
Meet Me In Montauk 