Seven Songs for the Week #83 - 6th Nov 24

The wonderful world of streaming. Last Friday this new song appeared from Edie Brickell & her husband Paul Simon. Spectral yet inimate, like Paul's last record Seven Psalms, the reasoning for the release didn't seam obvious until we get to the last line: "I'm wondering where is the country I promised my children?"

I have not keeping up with the records The Darkness have put out since their reactivation in 2011. Their flame burned bright when their first appeared on the scene, but drugs, ego, drugs, management, drugs and a mess of a second album ended things. Since 2011 they have been putting in the work: six more albums, gigging, and leaning into the things that made people like them in the first place, namely fun & tunes. So I thought I'd see what the first single from album eight sounds like. It's a sprightly McCartney/Sparks/Queen confection that just has to be loved. The ending is particularly silly. There's nothing wrong with humour in music.

I saw a thing last week saying it was 50 years since Kraftwerk put out Autobahn, and in the same breath it was 25 years since this single came out. It's amusing that this track is now closer to Autobahn than it is to today.

Last week John Mulaney hosted SNL. His comedy can have very specific references within it, and so when this track and it's producer Shooter McGavin came up in a promo supposedly written by Bob Dylan (it's easier to watch than explain: https://youtu.be/yWEpELHZpn4 ) I felt massively behoved to check if it was a real song or not. It is!

I used to be totally plugged into the world of Radiohead: buy the albums on the day they came out, go see them live, they were a band for the ages. The drift away was slow. I was busy when In Rainbows happened, as acclaimed as it is, I never connected with it. The King Of Limbs was most memorable for me becuase I was leaving London after 7 years and went to a release event at the Rough Trade East record store. Two newspapermen arrived and started handing out a unique King of Limbs newspaper - one was Stanley Donwood, who I didn't recognise at the time, and the other was Thom Yorke. Thom stayed for over two hours handing papers out to fans and saying hello. This was just before the era of the selfie, however I did have a video camera with me and I filmed the day and got a picture with Thom. Didn't listen to King of Limbs, skipped A Moon Shaped Pool and now it's The Smile. I very much liked Zero Sum from the recent album. My wife bought the Wall of Eyes album earlier this year, stuck it on the shelf and forgot about it. I found it and gave it a spin. It's very good and needs many more spins, but it's a grower. (Sidepoint: If you look at Stanley Donwood's wikipedia entry, his picture is from the same day I met them.)

SNL again - he's the musical guest later this week. I'd read he's a new "guitar hero' and a "bedroom musician" which means that he sounds like... the outro of a b-side by The Police. Ummm, ok.

In the summer I picked up Bob Dylan's Springtime in New York, a 5CD set from the Bootleg Series covering his golden period of 1980-1985. I have been quietly dipping in. It is not an era of Bob I am familiar with. Listening to CD3 I was struck by this song, previously unknown to me - apparently it evolved into Foot of Pride. There's an acoustic version on the set not available on streaming. This band version sounds like it's going to tip into Tangled Up IN Blue at any moment.