Elvis Costello, yet again

In my last post on the topic, I implied that the Get Happy!! bonus CD was better than the King of America bonus CD, but now I'm reconsidering. It's true that there are more tracks of interest on the Get Happy!! bonus CD, but none of them are as good as "Having It All" or "End of the Rainbow" from the King of America bonus CD. Elvis Costello's singing on those tracks is so desolate it's almost heartbeaking.

Ghostbusters

I saw something today that reminded me that I'd seen Ghostbusters when it first came out, and had thought it only mildly amusing. I had thought it would be about three guys calling themselves "ghostbusters" trying to exorcise ghosts that didn't exist. That would have been funny. Instead it turned out to be about three guys successfully exorcising ghosts that did exist, and I didn't see what was funny about that. Also, I think you have to "get" Bill Murray to find the movie funny, and I didn't. And, since I never watched Ghostbusters again, or anything else with Murray in it subsequently (except a few minutes of Lost in Translation) I probably still don't.

King of America bonus disc

So, to finish up with the Elvis Costello bonus discs, the King of America bonus disc is intermediate in value between the Get Happy!! and Blood and Chocolate bonus discs. Its highlights are "Having It All," "I'll Wear It Proudly" and "End of the Rainbow," three moving solo acoustic demos; "Betrayal," an outtake; a terrific live version of "The Big Light"; and some lightweight but fun live blues covers.

Oh, and I'm feeling better today.

Questioning this blog

Technically, I've been pretty good about posting something every day either here or on my main blog. But I'm starting to wonder if there's any point to this if I'm just going to post stuff written in five minutes at the end of the day when I'm exhausted. This wasn't what I intended when I started this blog.

Get Happy!! bonus CD

[I slipped yesterday. I had a post all ready to go, but didn't get around to posting it until I was too tired to do anything but sleep. So here it is today, bright and early, and not counting as today's post.]

Get Happy!! was originally a twenty-track album, which was an awful lot for an LP back in those days. (The Rhino set even includes an unlisted bonus track of a radio commercial for the LP whose main selling point was that it had so many tracks.) Of course, twenty tracks on a CD is nothing special; but Rhino outdoes themselves on the bonus disc, which contains thirty tracks (not counting the one mentioned above). And a substantial proportion of these are worth repeated listenings. Some are better than anything on the original LP. The tracks that stand out are alternate versions of "B Movie" and "Girls Talk," "Hoover Factory," "Just a Memory," an alternate version of "New Amsterdam," demos of six songs that appear on Get Happy!! and a solo acoustic demo of a previously unreleased song called "Seven O'Clock."

The Get Happy!! demos are quieter and more subdued, with a country-rock flavor and without the swirling keyboards that dominate the album. I'm normally not in favor of rock being quieter and more subdued, let alone of country rock, but in this case the demos are way better. It's not that I don't like the sound of the album: I do. But on the demos, the songs sound like they're good songs. On the album, they don't.

Listening to these albums, I came to the realization that I like Elvis Costello best when he's keeping things relatively simple. Simple arrangements, either unadorned and acoustic, or straight-out rock; and simple (for Elvis Costello, anyway) lyrics. Which is a problem, of course, because his tendency has been to complicate things (at least up until Spike, when I stopped listening to him).

A placeholder post

Once again, it's late and I'm tired. I'm writing a post, but I won't finish it tonight. So consider this a placeholder, to be expanded later.

I've been listening to the bonus disc to Get Happy!! as I intimated in my last post, and there's a lot more interesting stuff there than on the Blood and Chocolate bonus disc, even proportionately. (There are twice as many tracks on the former as on the latter.) Specifically, I found twelve tracks worth listening to more than once, or even twice. If you want to play along at home, they're tracks 8, 9, 16, 17 and 19-26.

Blood and Chocolate bonus CD

If you read my earlier Blood and Chocolate post, you may have wondered why I was listening to the album in the first place if I remembered it as not being very good. The short answer is: the bonus CD. The long answer is that about a week ago I noticed that my local library had copies available of the early 2000s Rhino reissues of Get Happy!! King of America and Blood and Chocolate. Each of these reissues came with a bonus disc loaded with tracks. I was an Elvis Costello fan back when people thought of him as being punk, or at least New Wave. And though I wasn't interested in hearing the albums themselves again, I was curious enough about the bonus tracks to borrow the CDs. This set me off on an Elvis Costello mini-project, in the course of which I decided to listen to the original albums after all.

Well, of the three bonus discs, the one for Blood and Chocolate is by far the least interesting. There were only three tracks that drew my attention: an uptempo version of "Battered Old Bird," a track called "American Without Tears No. 2 (Twilight Version)" which has the same music as the King of America track but almost completely different lyrics, and a song called "Seven Day Weekend" with Jimmy Cliff. The first two of these are not necesssarily better than the original versions ("American Without Tears No. 2" is definitely worse), but they're interesting to listen to.

Incidentally, I didn't post yesterday because it was my birthday and I decided to give myself a day off.