marramgrass

Earlier this year, there was an ad for John Lewis with a cover of Billy Joel’s “She’s Always A Woman”. The internet came through and told me that the cover was by a lad named Fyfe Dangerfield, from his album Fly Yellow Moon which came out at the start of this year.

It’s an interesting kind of cover. In arrangement it stays very close to Billy Joel’s recording of the song, yet it manages to still be quite different in feel. There’s a little more space in the production, with a slightly more live feel to it. The rawer piano tone and the singer-songwriter vocal style combine to give the song a much more contemporary feel than Joel’s original.

I’ve listened to the two versions back to back several times now, and I’m having trouble getting my head ’round how they can be so similar and so different, all at once. If I had to pick one, I’d say that Dangerfield’s cut is the one I prefer — and I’m something if a closet Billy Joel fan. (Don’t worry. I didn’t have any credibility left to lose.)

This song interested me enough to buy Fly Yellow Moon. The album’s a grower. Lots of gentle pianos, mixed with some more Brit-poppy moments, and a vocal that reminds me a little of Damien Rice, only much better. The opening track, “When You Walk In The Room”, is a blinder, with “High On The Tide” and “Livewire” other standouts. Definitely worth picking up.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife suggested to me that I do a bit of tidying up in the room I use as an office. (It was a fair enough suggestion.) I was digging through a pile of old CD-Rs, cassettes and floppy disks, and turned up a tape I’d sort of half been looking for for months.

One side of the tape was a set of demos from 2001, five from Iain Archer and a few from The Amazing Pilots. The Archer tracks are from before Flood The Tanks, and include a couple of songs in very different forms to the ones that made the album.

The best of them is “Mirrorball Moon”, which I remember hearing first at a small acoustic gig in Edinburgh at what must has been roughly around the time these were recorded.

Archer’s music has changed quite a lot over the years, and you wouldn’t thin, listening to more recent albums, that this was the same guy who recorded the lightweigt “Wishing” not that long ago. These demos are probably the most recent recordings I have from him that I genuinely enjoy. The tale in “Mirrorball Moon” of an old dance hall’s changing character over time reflects the change in Archer’s music — not necessarily for better or worse, but definitely changing in character. Sadly, that change has left me behind.

I haven’t done one of these in quite a while. Six or seven months, maybe.

We watched (500) Days of Summer one evening last week. It was pretty good: easy-going, interesting, a little bit different. Maybe a bit too self-aware, but aren’t a lot of movies, these days?

It turns out that the female lead, Zooey Deschanel, appeared on the soundtrack and sings with the band She & Him. I grabbed their two albums, and have had them on repeat pretty much the whole time I’ve been at my desk since. The music is cheerful, easy, confectionary for the ear, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that.

“Over It Over Again” is from the second album, imaginatively titled Volume Two.

“Over It Over Again” [YouTube]

Sometimes the power in music is in the associations it makes with what else is going on when you hear it. This week’s tune, “Remains” by Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon, is a great track by itself, but I enjoy it more for how I came across it.

Whedon’s brother Joss is the man behind some of the most interesting genre TV of the last decade or so: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Firefly and the current Dollhouse. The fraught first season of Dollhouse ended with an unexpected and initially unaired future-set episode called “Epitaph One”, in which the writers were pretty cruel to their characters in order to lay out some of the darker ideas the show plays with. Revolving around a couple of powerful scenes, “Epitaph One” is very good TV (much better than unfortunately large chunks of Dollhouse‘s first season).

The sadness and hope of the final scene of the episode can be heard in the song.

“Remains” [YouTube]

There seems to have been a glut of good, smart TV over the last number of years. I hear The West Wing and Battlestar Galactica talked about a lot, although I haven’t seen any of either of them. (I’ll hear about that, I know.) As in books and in film, I find some really high quality hidden away in genres where the mainstream might never find it. That’s a shame, I think.

Eleven years ago I sat among a group of people in a church hall and played a bit of guitar. There was a friend there who, with a bit of encouragement, did some fine singing. Last week, after a long time gigging and winning some financial backing, that friend released her first album.

I tend to experience slight anxiety when someone I know releases a recording. It could be a bit awkward if I don’t actually enjoy listening to the music. It gets bought as a matter of course, but not necessarily listened to much. I’m glad to say that I have been enjoying listening to Coming Around by Elle Stevenson.

For a first long-player it’s a strong collection of tracks in the acoustic-y, piano-y, female singer-songwriter-y vein. (Hmm. Does that sell it terribly well?) The song that has really caught my ear is “Almost Forgiven”, with its disarmingly jaunty piano line. (I suppose I might regret ‘jaunty’, too. I’m no good at this game.) If you like it, you should like the rest of the album. Behind the smooth presentation, some of the lyrics are pretty raw. It’s an effective combination.

No streaming options for this one, again. This is what happens when I pick songs from less-prominent local artists. You can get a short preview — or buy it! — on Amazon’s MP3 store. There are also a few tracks for listening on Elle’s Last.fm page.

U2 get a lot of stick, probably partly because of Bono’s media profile and charitable efforts. Is it easier to be philanthropic when you’re stupendously rich? I don’t know, actually.

I came to U2 pretty late in the day, as a teenager, somewhere between Zooropa and Pop; my friends included a disproportionate number of pretty intense U2 fans. I devoured the back catalogue, eventually came to love Pop, and got pretty hooked.

I’ve backslidden a little since then. The shine started to fade during my first listen to How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, and the Vertigo show we caught in Glasgow did next to nothing for me. (This was disappointing. The two other times I’ve seen them live were memorable for all the right reasons. Elevation in Manchester is one of my favourite gigs.) I think I’ve listened to No Line On The Horizon three or four times at most.

The band were at the height of their powers when they were (so the story goes) at their least cohesive as a group, in the time of Achtung Baby and Zooropa. This was when the songwriting was still sharp but the sound had hardened up a bit. Those two albums serve up some of my favourite tunes, including my probable Best Song Ever (I won’t name it — it’s too predictable).

On Zooropa, there’s the mundane yet surreal imagery of “Stay (Faraway, So Close)”, swaddled in blunt guitars and understated vocal harmonies. This song holds memories of driving home late at night, periodically tapping the back button on the car’s CD player to listen to it just one more time. I still find it difficult to listen to it just once, thanks to the shivers it gives me.

“Stay (Faraway, So Close)” [YouTube]

“Stay (Faraway, So Close)” [Spotify]

I went through a very comprehensive Counting Crows phase in my late teens. I’d still listen from time to time, and this morning the iTunes Genius threw up this track.

“Anna Begins” first featured on their debut album, but I got to love it on the VH-1 disc of the double album Across A Wire. (That’s a great introduction to the band, actually. Two discs, each a live show: one is an acoustic VH-1 Storytellers set, the other a rather louder MTV show.)

This song still represents some of my favourite writing from the band, and the VH-1 performance brings a suitable intensity to the track. Actually, I prefer quite a few of the arrangements in that set to the original album versions.

“Anna Begins” [YouTube] (Another different arrangement, but also good.)

“Anna Begins” [Spotify]

“The Lochmaben Harper” is one of those appealing folk songs telling a story that gets a smile. Yet, as is often true, a lot relies on the performance.

I took some photos a few years back, at the launch of Emily Smith‘s second album. She introduced the song with a bit of the tale, and sang it with the wit and the wink it needs and deserves. I remember it as a brilliant gig all round, actually.

Emily’s won a bunch of awards, and is well worth listening to. You can get her music, including this track, on iTunes.

(I can’t find “The Lochmaben Harper” on YouTube or Spotify, but you can find some tracks in each place: on Youtube and on Spotify.)

I had to miss a few weeks of the Tuesday Tunes, there. There hasn’t been much time for any kind of blogging, lately. Inbetweentimes, though, there has been much listening to music — or, at least, having of music on in the background while working on something that isn’t a blog post. Which gives me a few tracks to mind to choose from.

This week, then, is “Bearing Star”, from Iain Archer. It’s a gentle song off his Revelation Bell EP. In case you’re curious, Revelation Bell is by far my favourite of his released records. (I did have a MiniDisc of demos that included very different versions of songs like “Boy, Boy, Boy” and “Mirrorball Moon” to the ones that were eventually released on Flood The Tanks; I much prefer them to the album verisons. Those recordings were brilliant, but the disc was lost sometime during one of the house moves we made a few years ago, and I haven’t been able to find those recordings again. A shame.)

I’ve sung your name over in a thousand different ways
Because I like the sound of it and the person it portrays

(No streaming options I could find for this one.)

If you try and pick a standout track from the Bill Mallonee/Vigilantes of Love canon, you’re spoiled for choice. Country-ish rock with a conscience and a heart of protest, there’s a lot of powerful song. “Resplendent” is probably my favourite of the lot. I won’t bother trying to offer commentary; have a listen and I’ll let the song do its own talking.

Bill Mallonee, though. There’s a man who can write. He can perform, too. My introduction to him, and VoL, was at an acoustic gig in a church hall in Edinburgh. It was smallish room, with plastic stacking bucket chairs around folding tables, cabaret style. The venue tended to attract a slightly older than average gig-going crowd, and they seemed to know him well. I’ll say this: he tore the place up.

Ages ago, Jonny linked this article on where Bill Mallonee has ended up. There’s something slightly sad, and humbling, about it.

“Resplendent” [YouTube]

“Resplendent” [Spotify]