Post the last CD you Bought/Downloaded

You took the words right out of my mouth.

It must have been whilst you were kissing me.

I accidently recommended the wrong Randy Newman album.

The fantastic solo piano album is 'The Randy Newman Songbook'.

There are few moments in modern pop as beautiful and bleak, as pared down and loaded, as Randy Newman's 'In Germany Before the War'. It begins as a nursery rhyme, moves into a meditation on loss of self, and ends up a monstrous murder ballad.
I remember being shocked the first time I heard it, rattled by the notion that anyone could write such a crafted and contemplative song about a subject as beyond the pale of the traditional pop song as infanticide. That was when I realised that Randy Newman, often compared to Cole Porter, was anything but a traditional songwriter.


Article continues

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On The Randy Newman Song Book - the title a nod to Porter - the singer sits at his piano and only tentatively reworks eighteen songs from across his four-decade career. 'In Germany before the War' remains as chilling as when it first appeared on his forth album, Little Criminals, in 1977. There's that achingly plaintive chorus, for a start: 'I'm looking at the river, but I'm thinking of the sea'; the contours of an old man's mind and lost soul mapped out in two evocative lines.
Then, there's that pivotal moment in the second verse when the darkness becomes visible: 'The little girl has lost her way/With hair of gold and eyes of grey/Reflected in his glasses as he watches her'. See what I mean about chilling? And finally, there's the denouement, filled with stillness and dread: 'We lie beneath the autumn sky/My little golden girl and I/And she lies very still'.

Set in Düsseldorf in 1934, the song is also a metaphor for a nation about to enter a period of transgression and horror. This is big subject matter for a pop song, but Newman is a master of lyrical and melodic understatement, a writer for whom the pop song is a medium as powerful, intense and evocative as the short story.

As this album reiterates, he was the first, and perhaps the best, of modern pop's great storytellers, and its most accomplished satirist.

It is for the latter that he is best known, not least because the first of his few hit songs, 1977's 'Short People', a satire on racism and bigotry, brought protests from various American action groups representing the vertically challenged. He had already been banned from the airwaves in some parts of the unreconstituted South for 'Rednecks', a hilarious faux anthem, and for the epic, 'Sail Away', which tackled the often overlooked religious-based justifications for slavery.

Produced by contemporary console hotshot Mitchell Froom, at the behest of Warners, Song Book was, Newman has readily admitted, a reluctant undertaking, and one that adds little to the originals save that the singer now mumbles and slurs less than his younger self. But this is as good a place as any for the uninitiated to start, if only to see how extraordinarily prescient a songwriter he was. 'Political Science', a critique of American foreign policy, was written thirty years ago but sounds even more trenchant today. It begins with that great American wail, 'No one like us, I don't know why/We may not be perfect/But heaven knows we try', and is as close to Chomsky - if the prof possessed a sense of humour - as it is to dear old Porter.

He may well be the greatest contemporary American songwriter; he's easily the cleverest. And, by a long shot, the funniest. If you like wry on the rocks, Randy's your man.

Haha, thanks man

Muse - Black Holes & Revelations + Bonus DVD

Love it.

Late of the Pier - Fantasy Black Channel
Randy Newman - Big Love
The Band - The Band

Lessons To Be Learned - Gabriella Cilmi

Against Chica's recommendation I tried to resist, I really did! But I saw it today, I remembered how pretty she was. And Sweet About Me, oh man how she says "boy" turns me on, I couldn't resist any longer!

Haven't listened to it yet though. Though I read the Thank You's, she thanked me for buying it!

I sold my copy haha

I got a copy of These Days on vinyl if that counts.

I keep meaning to sell my Daughtry CD :/ But it's like the only band I have the whole catelouge of so I'm relucant to