“Welcome to the Working Week” | Elvis Costello
Source: thallydraper
Day 30 - Song/Album that brings up a certain time in your life
Here are some albums/artists and the memories they bring up:
Rancid, Life Won’t Wait - the summer I left secondary school
Green Day, American Idiot - my first year of university
Elvis Costello, My Aim Is True / The Shins, Oh Inverted World - the start of my year abroad in Japan
The Hold Steady, Stay Positive / Ghostface Killah, Supreme Clientele - the summer I graduated
Day 18 - Favorite singer
Another interesting one. Do I admire singers for their competence, or for their individual style? I’d say the latter - the performers on The X Factor are all “competent” in a purely technical sense, but their focus on schmaltzy balladry just irritates and angers me. While the musicians I most enjoy have singing voices that are “idiosyncratic”, to say the least.
Day 13 - Your favorite songwriter
Now this is a topic I can really get into.
My absolute favourite songwriter would be Elvis Costello. He can do witty, sardonic, bitter, mournful and moving. The amount of wordplay and arresting images he can cram into a single song is incredible.
And while I’m at it: Bob Dylan would have to be in the faves column as well, for his storytelling abilities and massive influence on everyone who came after him, as would Tom Waits (again, a great storyteller and an artist who, as his career went on, used his voice as another instrument in his ensemble), Leonard Cohen, Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford from Squeeze, and (probably shouldn’t have to mention this by now) Craig Finn of The Hold Steady.
And if you assume that “songwriter” overlaps with “lyricist” (which I will, because fuckit, it’s my Tumblr), I’d throw in MF Doom, Ghostface Killah and Mos Def as the most impressive hip-hop lyricists out there.
Day 06 - A song that makes you sad
I used to like songs that made me sad because they were mopey and self-pitying (“Let Down” by Radiohead, anything off Eels’ Beautiful Freak). Nowadays I’m mostly into songs that make me sad because they’re moving and poignant (Elvis Costello’s “Brilliant Mistake”, Arcade Fire’s “Intervention”, Bloc Party’s “Kreuzberg”). But for this day’s entry, I’m going to choose a song that makes me sad because of the feelings of accomplishment and loss it represents.
Joe Strummer’s last recorded album was Streetcore, with The Mescaleros. It was released after his death, and ends with a cover of Bobby Charles’ “Before I Grow Too Old.” The song’s called “Silver And Gold”, and it gets me every time I hear it, because it almost seems like Strummer is predicting his own too-soon death.
But it’s not a sad song in and of itself; it’s a celebration of living your life to the fullest, even in the shadow of mortality.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know what love is, when you’re old enough to know better…”
Source: nevver
The wolf in ‘National Ransom’ — and perhaps that one in the cover illustration — might have been a goat. A scapegoat,” says Costello. “We are always looking for someone to blame for our misfortunes and in this case we may have found the culprit. Look at his mug shot. He’s carrying a big bag of burning money. You can probably imagine how useful burning money can be. Then again, the wolf I have in mind is within us all. We are all complicit, if not accountable, desiring things that are beyond our means, handing power over us all to the wolves at the door.
Cover art for Elvis Costello’s forthcoming album, National Ransom.
