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).