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.
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