Seven Songs for the Week #139 - 3rd Dec 25

So last week I went to see Bob in concert, and this week I bought The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album I actually don't have. Two things: (1) I don't particularly have an affinity for very early Bob (so the recent Through An Open Window box wasn't for me), and (2) The copy of The Freewheelin' that I bought was the Record Store Day reissue of the album with its original tracklisting. Four songs would get replaced/removed, one of them being this one, Let Me Die In My Footsteps. On the eventual Freewheeln', Masters of War would take its place, but this original track says just as much about war. Listening to the record, I hadn't heard this track before, but I obviously own it, because it first surfaced on 1991's first Bootleg series collection, which I picked up about 25 years ago but obviously didn't pay much attention to. The danger of too many CDs.

Overall, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan stands up and cuts through to today. Another song pulled from the album, and also ignored by me on the 1991 Bootleg collection is Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues which rings true about the current state of beliefs of the US political right.

Sampling tracks from this unaffordable Bowie box and I landed on this. Always a track I liked from Reality, this version is miles ahead of the original. John Fruscante and yer man from Tool give it the right guitar and orchestra bedding.

Black Friday allowed me to pick up two Yoko Ono Strictly Canadian vinyl reissues which are exemplary. I already own Approximately Infinite Universe and Feeling the Space, so I got Plastic Ono Band and Fly. POB I know well, Fly, not so much. Greenfield Morning... is possibly my favourite Yoko track. She has a number of songs/pieces that reflect upon miscarriage, Life With The Lions is very upsetting. Musically, this is extraordinary drumming from Ringo (Plus John on guitar, Klaus Voorman on bass, and a tape loop of George Harrison, apparently). Ringo lays down a hypnotic rhythm that pre-dates Krautrock, and overall this is very futuristic music for 1970. Maybe John & Yoko should've headed to Berlin or Hamburg, instead of New York.

Along with Who Are You, Black and Blue has become an album I never cared for that I now quite like. I had never even heard it until a month ago. Hand of Fate feels like the blueprint for every not-quite-well-known Stones song for the following 40 years. You could imagine this kind of laconic thing being served up on any Ron Wood Stones album.

I have never listened to the album Fear by John Cale, however for the second time one of its tracks has ended up on one of these playlists having popped up on the soundtrack of a show I'm watching. This song appeared in Apple TV's Down Cemetery Road. Enjoyable enough tv fayre to pass the time if you don't mind some of the most lazy and stereotyped characters I've seen in some time, the husband being one glaringly awful example. Anyway, I should listen to this album.

End of year means lists, lists, lists and I quite liked NME's top 50 track of the year for 2025. I went to listen to some songs I didn't know and found this. Excellent pop with a bit in the middle (the 'hyperbole" bit) that sounds so utterly ABBA it's delicious.

This song has been out a couple of weeks now and keeps threatening to go to number one in the UK (on the proper charts). It's nice to have something that's funny and sexy against all the mope-pop. If you would like a crash course in male vs female pop standards, go onto YouTube and watch Raye's full-on performance of this song on Graham Norton in October, then compare it to Lewis Capaldi from the following week's show which has as much charisma and effort as a puddle.