I’m off early this morning to catch up with college friends for one of our semi-annual reunions, so I expect it’ll be quiet around here until next week. But, since it’s a holiday weekend of sorts, and since I’ve been perusing a number of MP3 blogs lately, I figured I wouldn’t leave on a jet plane before regaling you, my dear readers, with the Valentine’s gift of music. (The usual mp3blog rules apply: the files will be up this weekend and this weekend only, and please do not link to them.) So, without further ado:
You have to trust it,
Maybe not from the sources
you have poured yours
maybe not from the directions
you are staring at,
Twist your head around
it’s all around you
As y’all know, iconography from the stunning video to Bjork’s “All is Full of Love” has graced this site for years now, so it seemed a logical choice for GitM‘s Valentine. It’d be hard for me to introduce the song any better than Bjork did herself: “That song’s from a moment when I’d had a pretty rough winter and then it was a spring morning and I walked outside and the birds were singing: Spring is here! I wrote the song and recorded in half a day. It just clicked – you know: you’re being too stubborn, don’t be so silly, there is love everywhere. The feeling, the emotion of the song was like completely melting and loving everything and feeling like everything loved you, after a long time of not having that. The song, in essence, is actually about believing in love.“
Strangely enough, I experienced a very similar revelatory moment, traipsing around outside after a blizzard several years ago, while listening to this “Plaid” version of the song. It’s missing the languorous beat that’s so memorable in the single version, but I adore the fugue-like intro and textured, contrapuntal rhythms of this mix — They lend it a timeless, ethereal beauty that perfectly matches the celestial coo and growl of its Icelandic muse. I don’t want to hate on Love, Actually for too many posts in a row, but to my mind this song brilliantly encapsulates what that movie tried and failed to get at — Even in our loneliest moments, love surrounds us and binds us.
All is Full of Love (Plaid Mix) — Bjork (5.88MB, 4:17)
(song removed)
Original version on Homogenic.
[Update:]
***
I want you
I’m not ashamed to say I cried for you
I want you
I want to know the things you did that we do too
I want you
I want to hear he pleases you more than I do
I want you
I might as well be useless for all it means to you…
Bjork too sappy? Well, if, on the other hand, you prefer to spend Valentine’s Day prodding scars and excavating the thin line between love and hate, then here’s a streetlight serenade for you — a blistering-hot live version of Elvis Costello’s most savage, searing slow burn. Much of the resonance of the original “I Want You” lies in how what starts off as a run-of-the-mill torch song slowly degenerates into something much more complicated and sinister. This spooky, haunted-house version from the 2002 tour skips the set-up, but it’s nevertheless a poisonous mirrorball of rage and regret, bitterness and betrayal, loss and (self-)loathing…all those quintessential consequences of a love implosion that they just don’t seem to make Hallmark cards for (and it’s all topped off with a brief twinge of Yankee Power.) Our man Costello may be enthralled with Diana Krall these days, but as this song makes emphatically clear, there are still some things you just don’t wanna know about his dark life.
I Want You (Live in Nashville 2002) — Elvis Costello (15.1MB, 8:15)
(song removed)
Original version on Blood and Chocolate.
[Update]:
Either path you choose, have a safe and happy weekend, and I’ll catch y’all next week.