Ian Fitzgerald

I don’t spend a whole lot of any time over at the Word magazine blog, but I stumbled in today and found instructions to throw the ol’ iPod on shuffle and see what comes up.  Now, the A.V. Club has been doing this for year’s with its occasional Random Rules feature, but they’ve never come out and told me to do it.  Lucky for you, the gentle prodding of a random blog I don’t read is enough to get me to go for the gusto and post the results (with commentary!) here.  Is it a hackneyed blog topic?  Absolutely.  Have I dipped my toe in similar pools before?  You bet.  Will any of that stop me?  No way.

A caveat - I don’t own the iPod that I carry around with me: it was bequeathed to me by someone who upgraded to a newer model.  That said, I have made enough additions and subtractions to be able to account for most of the songs (2737 of them) on this thing.

Here we go.

1.) “Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)” :: Get Behind Me Satan :: The White Stripes - First off, I can’t believe this song and record came out in 2005.  I think this album got an unnecessarily bad rap, possibly due to the preponderance of marimba.  That said, this and other songs were permanently sullied when I realized they could be about Renée Zellweger.  (I should at no point have been forced to wonder, for example, if “The Nurse” is a reference to Nurse Betty.)  Compounding the natural Zellweger-phobia is the fact that Jack White broke his finger in a car accident with her, forcing him to cancel a series of White Stripes, including the one to which I had tickets…at the Ryman Auditorium.  That’s right.

2.) “For Beth” :: Swedish Sessions :: Ryan Adams - This song, from one of Ryan’s many many studio sessions back in 2001, later became the vastly inferior “Friends” on the otherwise great Cold Roses.  This version is lovely.

3.) “Love And Only Love” :: Weld :: Neil Young - The Ragged Glory material was pretty widely acclaimed when it came out back in 1990, but it always seemed to me to combine cookiecutter Crazy Horse jams with lazy hippie lyrics.  Not my favorite.

4.) “Black Diamond Bay” :: Desire :: Bob Dylan - Bob has spoken about the manner in which writing with Jacques Levy affected his songs, and the influence can really be heard on this song.  The lyrics have epic and theatrical qualities, with stage entrances and dialogue shaping a story in the manner of the previous year’s “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts.”  The sound of Desire is perfectly represented here.

5.) “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” :: 20 of Hank Williams Greatest Hits :: Hank Williams - This is a good one to end on.  These are probably my favorite Hank Williams lyrics, and they are easily his most traditionally poetic.  The music is perfect, too: it is absolutely lonesome to listen to this song, especially if you think about what it must have been like to write it.