Saturday Songs - Sept. 3

1. “It’s Better To Spend Money” – Quiet Company

Beginning with infectious keyboards and a cheer from the band, you know from the start that Quiet Company is a band to reckon with. But not only that, there are lyrics that jump out of the melody with a snarling comedy—“all the whores that you’ve had won’t make you a man.” They’ve got the same careful balance and sense of song structure as the pop geniuses Guster, but not yet the mature cachet. Perhaps someday?

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2. “Odds of Being Alone” – Amy Stoup and Trent Dabbs

This delicate song of love and loss is right up there with “Paperweight” (Joshua Radin and Schuyler Fisk). Consisting largely of the repeating lyric “wouldn’t you like to know?”—a question explicitly directed at the problem of the song’s title. With a gentle, acoustic rhythm, the song sounds just as sad as the lyrics are.

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3. “Harlan County” – Jim Ford

One of the most famous songs from a man who is now considered a “lost” songwriter—in the same vein as Blaze Foley—“Harlan County” is a tragic, funny anti-ode to the coal-mining county in Kentucky. The song is filled with arch character sketches, including of Willie, who marries his mother:

“He stood five-six

his brother was a shovel and a coal mine pick

with the heart of a lion and the soul of a man.

He worked twelve hours a day,

seven days ever’ week,

forty days ever’ month,

diggin’ for a bone in a hillside.”

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4. “Welcome to the Working Week” – Elvis Costello

Classic Costello, this was also the first song on Costello’s debut album. You have a template for so much of his work to come all in this one track. You’ve got the stirring of white-collar rage here (Costello had previously worked a number of office jobs—data entry clerk, etc.) and the suggestive wordplay that would become his trademark.

Additionally, in his first line, he has the audacity to make a masturbation reference: “Now that you’re picture’s in the paper being rhythmically admired” (my emphasis); how many artists have that kind of gall?

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5. “Amassed Complications” – Food Will Win The War

LISTEN HERE

Saddled with, as they admitted at a show I saw, “one of the worst band names in history,” Food Will Win The War starts off their five-song debut EP with this rollicking track. The rest of the EP, unfortunately, finds the band losing steam over the last four tracks, but this two-and-a-half-minute song is a real gem.