Seven Songs for the Week #89

Everything In Its Right Place has achieved an odd kind of ubiquity over the near quarter century since it first appeared. It's a song that opens things: On Kid A it was the first thing we got to hear of the new weird Radiohead; this week it opens this playlist because I started watching The Day Of The Jackal remake (it's...fine, could be so much better) and EIIRP opens that. Steven Haydn wrote a great book about Kid A a few years back and noted that when this song appeared a year after its release in the movie Vanilla Sky, it demonstrated that New Radiohead still existed in the mainstream.

Listened to Headquarters this week, a great album, and this two minute rush gets everything it needs to do quickly and succinctly and then gets out.

I first heard this song a few years back when someone on old Twitter was raving about it. It popped back into my head this week.

I've been listening to the George Harrison Living In the Material World reissue recently and Beck has just put out this cover of Be Here Now. Very gentle and it lets the meditative melody take over.

Fourth anniversary this week of Paul McCartney's Rockdown record, McCartney III. In my mind it exists as a Christmas record, wedded to dark evenings and withdrawl. I still think it's a great record and there's been no significant new music from Paul since, although his next record has been in the works for some time. Deep Deep Feeling is classic Macca on his own... extemporaneous, experimental, groovy, existing in the space where you're nearly asleep.

The record player had been out of action for a number of weeks as I unexpectedly had no floor. The only record I bought in that time was this Black Friday RSD release. I am a fan of alternate, or might-have-been, versions of albums. I haven't listened to the album more than once, but it sounds direct, riffy and short. Curiously it has songs that are solo songs featuring just one member (Edge), lyrics written outside of U2, and it feels that they've been a bit looser with the all-4-on-everything vibe, which is good. This is the only song that shares a title with a track on the "parent" album, but it is different. They missed a trick not calling it All Because of U2.

As Everything In Its Right Place is the ultimate opening song, Won't Get Fooled Again is probably the archetypical "ending" song. And so it closes out episode three of Day of the Jackal. As cliched as this song can sometimes seem due to things like CSI and all that, I was delighted to hear it.