Why all the best Christmas songs are just a little bit sad
It was Christmas Eve, babe, In the drunk tank, An old man said to me, ‘Won’t see another one.’ – The Pogues, ‘Fairytale of New York’ I have no shame or hesitation calling this one of the most devastating lines in music. No matter how many times I’ve heard it, it hits with all the…
The 10 Best Joni Mitchell Covers
When it comes to your favourite artists, it’s hard for a cover version to stand up to the original. It can feel jarring, inauthentic, even disrespectful sometimes to hear their words and melodies sung by another voice. But a cover that truly reimagines the source material, while capturing its essence, can allow you to experience…
The E Street Shuffle: Bruce Springsteen’s messy, flamboyant, life-affirming second album
In 1973, when Bruce Springsteen presented his completed second LP The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle to Charles Koppelman at Columbia Records, he was told in no uncertain terms that the record would be a commercial flop. With its scruffy musicianship and lengthy, sprawling songs, the album would, Koppelman believed, kill Springsteen’s…
The Rising Tide of Climate Change Music
For as long as there has been protest, there have been protest songs. Yet the greatest threat to humanity’s survival, an existential emergency facing every last one of us, has wormed its way into relatively little of our music. While Neil Young watched ‘Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s’, Joni Mitchell warned ‘you…
Revisiting Taylor Swift’s Red
Last week Taylor Swift released her newly re-recorded version of her 2012 album Red. I look back on why this ‘happy, free, confused and lonely’ record remains her best work to date. ‘Like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street’: this is how Taylor Swift describes a doomed love affair on Red’s title track,…
Solar Power, Folklore and the Dream of Escape
Whether it’s flinging your phone into the ocean or fleeing to the mountains, singers are calling on us to abandon the digital world and embrace nature. But is this escape into the outdoors a radical act of rebellion or an unattainable fantasy? ‘I’m not cut out for all these cynical drones, / these hunters with…
The Raincoats, and the imperfect humanity of music
If the ethos of punk rock was to rip up the hit-making rulebook, strip back the gloss and the excess, and value raw fervour over technical accuracy, then the Raincoats, formed in 1977 by then novice musicians Ana da Silva and Gina Birch, were perhaps the punkest of the punk. Their band took the homemade…
Joni Mitchell’s Blue: 50 years of a perfect album
On the title track, a deep, melancholy abyss at the heart of the album, Mitchell compares songs to tattoos: permanent, personal, close. ‘Hey, Blue’, she sings, ‘there is a song for you, ink on a pin / underneath the skin / an empty space to fill in.’ Within Blue, every space is filled in with…
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