Thursday, April 16, 2009

Friday's best pop song ever

6 comments:

houseinrlyeh aka Denis said...

Elvis C. is always excellent.

Anonymous said...

I love this song! It's been a long time since I heard it. Imperial Bedroom is my fave Elvis Costello album.

Todd said...

Mine, too -- in a three-way tie with This Year's Model and Trust. I have the Rhino double-disc version of this album, and I've found listening to the many alternate versions of "Man Out of Time" on it at once fascinating and torturously frustrating. It's interesting to contrast how completely organic the song sounds in it's finished version with the obviously very difficult time that EC and the Attractions had coming up with a proper arrangement -- and melody -- for it. Listening to all of those, almost uniformly awful early versions, I feel like a sidelined time traveler, restricted from intervening, but so desperately wanting to jump in, forcibly pull their hands off their instruments and go, "No, no, no, no! It goes like this!".

Beth Loves Bollywood said...

I've just dug back into my EC stash this week and am SO happy about it.

Anonymous said...

I've found listening to the many alternate versions of "Man Out of Time" on it at once fascinating and torturously frustrating.And here I thought that perfectly formed pop songs just sprung uncontrollably from Elvis Costello's forehead!

On the Rhino version, do they keep the original release on one disc and all the extras on the other? Part of me would want to keep the memory of the original album totally separate and intact.

Todd said...

Yeah, that was what was nice about those Rhino reissues. I mean, outtake and demo versions are fascinating and all, but with rare exceptions I don't need to listen to them more than once or twice. Its nice to have them all tucked away on a second disc.