The Let’s Get Lyrical campaign was born of a desire to combine Edinburgh’s status as an official City of Literature, with Glasgow’s as a City of Music.  There are events being held throughout February and it will come as no surprise to discover that they are a bit of a step up from the dreary indie pish I usually feature on these pages.

As you can imagine, there are an awful lot of scholarly things that can be written about this topic and, as you can probably also imagine, you aren’t going to read them here.  Nothing about all the value of oral traditions, the role of lyrics in folk music, or even the emotional impact of the details of the lyrics versus the more abstract emotions generated by the music – I have stuff to say about all of these things, but I am down visiting my folks in London at the moment, so settling in to write an essay would be considered somewhat uncouth, I suspect.

Instead, I have picked six fairly random songs by six of my favourite lyricists, and will write just a little bit about why they resonate with me so much.  I find it amazing how important I can find lyrics – to the extent that I would suggest that music can make you love a song, but only lyrics can make it a part of your soul – and yet there are vast swathes of my music collection where I am neither aware of, nor particularly interested in the lyrics.  A lot of the time they’re just plain indecipherable, and in the absence of liner notes in the digital age, tracking them down seems like an awful lot of work and I rarely do it; I doubt I am alone.

What it tends to take is a particular hook.  I hear a phrase which snags me, and then I am pulled in.  But for a lot of music I am happy enough for that not to happen, and just to enjoy the tunes.  When you really do connect with the lyrics, though, the impact of a song changes totally.

Eef Barzelay – The Ballad of Bitter Honey (Amazon)

Eef Barzelay, whether with Clem Snide or solo, has written some of the best, cleverest, wryest, most cutting lyrics I have ever heard.  This is the man responsible for the phrase ‘the root canal music of a prom night disaster’, but this song might just be his greatest.  Written from the point of view of a dancer whose ‘ass you saw bouncing next to Ludacris’ it manages to create the portrait of a sweet natured, shallow girl trying her very, very best to wring some sense of self-worth out of life, and failing.  Horribly.  It manages a particularly remarkable trick of being at once utterly excoriating in its description of the mores of the modern world, and yet tenderly sympathetic of the person who both embodies them and bears their burden.  So much sympathy and so much rage.  But that’s Eef Barzelay for you.

Eef Barzelay – The Ballad of Bitter Honey

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Barton Carroll – Shadowman (Amazon)

I don’t know how closely this song draws from real life, but this is a portrait of an over-shadowed, jealous and weak younger brother so well constructed and harrowing as to make me feel a little bit sick every time I hear it. As I have written many times before when describing this song, the absence of any shred of redemption is just plain merciless.  Very few people in pop music seem to have the sensitivity to construct such a believable relationship and such a real protagonist as this, and yet also the courage to eschew the mandatory happy ending.  It really is a brutally nasty, mean song.

Barton Carroll – Shadowman

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Songdog – Gene Autry’s Ghost (Amazon)

Songdog are a different kettle of fish.  Their lyrics are cryptic, clever and acerbic.  I remember listening to the start of this song, tum-te-tumming along, and suddenly doing a double-take.  ’What the fuck did they just say?’  I rewound the song and yes, they really did sing: “I’m nobody special, but I give pretty good head.” Songdog do this all the time.  They are dark, horribly (by which, of course, I mean awesomely) cynical and you always get the impression that you are a step or two behind what they are trying to tell you.  There’s such resignation to the music that this never seems pretentious or condescending however, just the work of a band who are woefully underappreciated and seem to have stopped expecting you to get it.

Songdog – Gene Autry’s Ghost

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Billy Bragg – The Saturday Boy (Amazon)

I must be one of thousands of young men who heard this song and thought ‘Fucking hell, that was me!  I am the Saturday Boy!’ Billy Bragg does this all the time, particularly in his early work, and this is far from alone in its ability to absolutely and utterly nail what it feels like to be male and lacking in both sexual confidence and skills.  Almost every man I know has in his past a girl on whom they had the most unspeakable crush and who, for all she may have enjoyed our company as much as the attention, had about as much intention of going out with us as she did of flying to the moon.  The closing line sums it up so well: “While she was giving herself for free/ At a party to which I was never invited”.  People think of Bragg as a bit of a caricature of himself these days, but that’s massively unfair.  Political songs aside, his love songs show a writer more gifted than anyone I know at taking all sorts of complex emotions, and entanglements and distilling them into a single line, full of warmth, a bit of humour and, most of all, the knowledge that he absolutely, undoubtedly Got It.

Billy Bragg – The Saturday Boy

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The Mountain Goats – Dance Music (Amazon)

I am not a particularly committed fan of Darnielle’s wider canon, but The Sunset Tree is a stone cold classic.  There are a lot of tender, heartwarming  and heartbreaking moments on the record, but one of those stop-dead-in-your-tracks moments occurs early in this short, perfect song.  Coming from a stable family background as I do, I would never be so stupid as to suggest that I can really grasp the kind of domestic horror described here: “I’m in the living room watching the Watergate hearings/ while my step father yells at my mother./ launches a glass across the room, straight at her head/ and I dash upstairs to take cover./ lean in close to my little record player on the floor./ so this is what the volume knob’s for.” It is short, direct, unflinching and does what all great writing should: finds not just details, but the one crucial detail.  I remember that one short verse bringing me so much clarity: the violence, the fear, the intense relationship with music.  I am sure I still don’t entirely grasp what this kind of life is really like, but this song has done more for my understanding than any advertising campaign or newspaper article I have ever come across.

The Mountain Goats – Dance Music

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Tom Waits – Fish and Bird (Amazon)

In this particular case, it is not so much just about the lyrics themselves, as the personal context.  I bought Alice just as Mrs. Toad and I were getting together and listened to it constantly.  She lived in Edinburgh, I in London, and we went back and forth every couple of weeks – it was a rather improbable romance in many ways, but a complete whirlwind nevertheless.  It was pretty obvious to both of us, I think, that this was something special, but as the months wore on it slowly became clearer and clearer that resolving our geographical problem was going to be a very, very significant challenge.  Mrs. Toad was a touch more spooked by this than I was and the relationship suddenly became very, very shaky indeed – you know when you can hear the tension in someone’s voice and you know that something is up, even if you can’t dig the details out of them. Anyway, after Christmas of the first year of our relationship she decided she couldn’t face it and packed it all in, putting an end to over a month of looming unease which had taken the shine off eight months of thrilled, giddy romance.  Fortunately for me (and her I suppose) she saw the error of her ways two or three months later and came crawling (hey, this is my story, so that’s how I’m telling it okay – so what if it wasn’t exactly crawling per se, but I digress…) back.  However, in those months before she saw sense I was trying to come to terms with the fact that it seemed I had lost the girl I was absolutely certain I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.  And I drank gin and listened to this song.  A lot.

Tom Waits – Fish and Bird

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Welcome to the start of this year’s Song, by Toad Festive Fifty, where I list, in order, my favourite fifty songs of the year.  As with the albums of the year, I have had to exclude Song, by Toad Records bands from this list.  Partly this is to stop me inevitably wounding the pride of whichever bands fared less well than their label mates, and partly to stop the label collectively dominating this list too much.

I don’t think the concept of objectivity is possible, or even all that relevant, when it comes to discussing what music you like, but I am so closely involved with the music on our label that there would inevitably end up being so many of our songs on here that I think it might well run the risk of just boring people, honestly.  You all know about the label by now, you all know where to find the music we release, and it pretty much goes without saying that I would only release it if I thought it was bloody brilliant to begin with, so no need to labour the point in my end of year lists.

31. Cotton Jones – Sail of the Silver Morning The weird collision of the modern and the old-fashioned on this record has its less successful moments, but is amazing when it really clicks.  You end up with what should be fairly plain and lovely pop songs, yet with an elusively strange undercurrent to them.  His voice is strange, and hers is fucking lovely, which also helps.

32. Titus Andronicus – A More Perfect Union This whole album, frankly, is fucking ridiculous.  But it’s ridiculous with such joyful exuberance that I just couldn’t help but love it – after I’d overcome the ‘what in the precious bundle of cherry-flavoured fuck is this then?’ reaction of course.  This track pretty much embodies the crazy brilliance of the whole record as well as anything, I think.  Turn it up loud, and don’t be ashamed of punching the air like a fool.

33. Thirty Pounds of Bone – A Lesson in Talking There’s an extremely harsh edge to Method which my choosing this particular song for my Festive Fifty somewhat neglects.  There is still plenty of bleakness in the lyrics of course, but the loveliness of the music rather overcomes it.  Maybe that’s why I like the song so much – but there are plenty, plenty more where this came from on the album.

34. Liars – The Overachievers I am not sure why none of the more sinister songs on Sisterworld made this list, because it’s not all about battering the shit out of the guitars.  But having had my fillings severely rattled by these lads at SXSW has rather come to dominate how I think of them.  Loud please!

35. Broken Records – Home I can almost see the band rolling their eyes at me as once again I pick one of their quiet songs for my end of year lists.  Broken Records are very much not a quiet band, but that’s probably why songs like this end up standing out so much, particularly when they draw the curtain on such a brilliant album.  There’s a lot of tension in Let Me Come Home too, and this song really does feel like a release at the end of it.

36. Ringo Deathstarr – Imagine Hearts I haven’t heard anything from Ringo Deathstarr for years, but this is a wonky bit of excellence.  There’s plenty of shoegaze here, and the backing sounds like it’s being played on a tape so old it has distorted to the point where it will barely play properly anymore.  And this, of course, is a good thing.

37. The National – Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks I could no more explain why this song is now one of my favourite on High Violet than I could explain why I really didn’t like the album itself all that much for about three months after it came out.

38. Barton Carroll – Shadowman Apart from the fact that this is a gorgeous song in itself, I absolutely defy anyone to listen to the lyrics and not choke up.  It is a bitter tale of mean-spirited weakness without a shred of redemption at the end of it.  Truly brutal.

39. Broken Records – A Leaving Song A Leaving Song perhaps sums up the new Broken Records album as well as any other individual song on the album.  It’s exuberant, tight and driven and manages to balance a definite air of confrontation with a real sense of focus.  This may be because I know more about the personal emotions behind the album than I really should, as a straightforward music fan, but nevertheless the purpose of a band with a point to prove seems to have made this song, and the whole album, really quite excellent.

40. The Scottish Enlightenment – The First Will Be Last This song just builds and builds and is one of relatively few Scottish Enlightenment songs to end with something vaguely approaching a crescendo of guitars and noise.  It takes bloody ages to do so as well,

41. The Driftwood Singers – Coco Ellis The production and arrangements are copied and pasted so directly from some old, romanticised version of the past that this borders just a little on parody, but that really doesn’t matter to me, I must confess, because the results are fucking great.

42. Warm Ghost – Open the Wormhole in Your Heart There may be plenty of muffled electronica out there, working to reproduce the wobbly distortion of old analogue equipment, but this is easily some of the best I have heard.  The construction of crackle and stumble, and the hints of the epic about the vocals, give this song an amazing dynamic between its anthemic and introverted lo-fi aspects.

43. Hurray for the Riff Raff – Slow Walk This is the flipside of a similar fascination with lovely old-time music as seems to motivate The Driftwood Singers, but in this case it’s clean and clear, with a lovely twang to the lead vocal, and a simple hook running all the way through the song.  Anyone who loved Samantha Crain’s early stuff is almost certain to love this song.

44. Cotton Jones – Song in Numbers The way the rhythm of this song drifts into passivity before rattling itself into life is probably one of the key things which makes it special for me.

45. Keaton Henson – Oliver Dalston Browning There’s nothing at all to this song except the gentle rise and fall of the guitar, recorded in as raw and unaffected way as you could ask for, and then Henson’s gorgeous, trembling voice. To do so much with so little is really impressive, and this song is just beautiful.

46. Hot Panda – Mindlessnesslessness This might be the closest to a haircut song in this whole list – the band even have ‘Panda’ and ‘Hot’ in their name and everything.  Hot Crystal Bear Fuck Owl Ghost Panda!  Never mind the name though, this is a brilliant song, tucked away near the end of a varied and interesting but slightly inconsistent album.  The thumping bounce of the start of it, compared to the odd epilogue (there is probably a technical term for this which I don’t know) which breaks in about two-thirds of the way through is just weird.  And excellent.

47. Roy Robertson – Icing This is a spooky but lovely acoustic pop song for about a minute and a half, before handclaps and spacey swooshing noises raise it up to a euphoric finale.  A bit like the Hot Panda song, but this gears the song up rather than down.

48. Tusk Tusk – Crazy Little Birthmarks Another song which starts as a simple, rolling acoustic pop track, but in this case the build is more gradual, as a choral backing swells and grows until it envelops the whole thing.  The song then steadily crumbles until there is nothing but the choir and a simple electric guitar refrain, and then finally silence.

49. Silver Columns – Brown Beaten Pure, awesome disco-pop.  I have never seen a single song generate so much interest in a band in my life (well, not amongst the kind of music I listen to anyway), and I have heard some people grumble about this being just a Bronski Beat knock off etc etc etc, but in all honesty, the only way you could dislike this song is if you hate fun in some fundamental and frankly unhealthy way.  Pure.  Pop.  Genius.

50. Jason Lytle – Indie Rock Freestyle Alright, so something of a lighthearted one to end with.  But this spirit of freedom and playfulness is precisely what gives Lytle’s album of cast-offs and mutants such liveliness compared to some of the more sticky stuff he’s released in the past few years.  It may not be a proper album, as such, but the liberated approach that results is brilliant, and little embodies that throwaway attitude better than this.

Click here to download all these songs in one zip file.

1-10 | 11-30 | 31-50

I love Barton Carroll.  The first time I heard him it all just sounded like boring old meat-and-two-veg alt-country, which it kind of is, but there is definitely something special about it.

Basically, this music is all about the lyrics.  Which is not to say that I don’t love the actual tunes or the instrumentation, but the really exceptional stuff is in words.  It’s all very simple, but the storytelling is deft and poignant.  The subject matter is so close to the generic paradigm that it can take a little time to realise that he pulls almost every song away from it with a subtle sidestep. Shadowman, for example, a song about sibling rivalry, does not offer any redemption.

I said in the podcast recently that the bleak everyday stories of disappointment which he pieces together remind me of a certain kind of American novellist, but unfortunately I really don’t have the literary knowledge to properly explain the comparison, or even to know if it’s really valid.  Basically, remember the brilliant Empire Falls by Richard Russo?  That’s what Carroll’s songwriting reminds me of.

This record, however, unlike his previous album The Lost One, doesn’t seem to quite sustain this excellence all the way through, unfortunately.  Almost exactly at the halfway point the quirks he almost always seems to find cease to add their particular surprises to the songs and musically it all becomes a bit stodgy.

Past Tense could be read as a fairly hairy-knuckled song about intellectual snobbery and chips on shoulders combining to wreck a relationship, although it’s feasible that the line about finding a young girl with ‘no brains at all’ signifies a parody, but I wouldn’t want to bet the house on it.  Either way, musically it’s a bit of a country pastiche anyway, and not very satisfying.  Monday Night just fails to find a spark, really, in my opinion, and this weighs down the album at just the wrong time.

So while The first half of the record is uniformly brilliant, there are some moments in the middle which don’t quite ignite that lovely slow burn of which he is capable.  Nevertheless, this is a fucking lovely album and I highly recommend it.

Barton Carroll – This Poor Boy Can’t Dance

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Barton Carroll – Shadowman

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It’s freezing outside and (just slightly) covered in snow (about half an inch) so naturally the entire nation has ceased to function.  Erm, okay, it really isn’t that cold and the snow really isn’t that big a deal in all honesty but of course given the worst weather conditions we usually have to deal with are constant and life-sapping drizzle it seems that it’s all come as a bit of a shock to the nation as a whole.

We live in a city by the sea of course, which means that we never get the sunshine which is promised and sadly, during the winter, we never get the snow or the cold either.  In the countryside it may occasionally be dangerous, but in the city it’s never much more than a stunningly picturesque inconvenience, and the bastard stuff will all have melted by next week anyway, so we might as well enjoy it while we still can.

This week the podcast is not themed at all, it’s just new and interesting stuff from my inbox.  I tend not to just slap up promo tracks emailed to me by PR chappies on the blog because, frankly, I really have nothing to say about them yet and I don’t really like firing out posts on the site when I don’t really have an opinion, right wrong or otherwise, to accompany it.  Podcasts, on the other hand, are a bit more spontaneous so they seem like a more suitable place to put new and interesting stuff before I have any real chance to figure out whether or not I actually like it properly.

Toadcast #103 – Baby, it’s Cold Outside

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01. Timber Timbre – Magic Arrow (Daytrotter Session) (01.47)
02. Drew Danburry – Many are Cold, but Few are Freezing (11.11)
03. Barton Carroll – The Poor Boy Can’t Dance (14.57)
04. Kid Canaveral – Good Morning (21.50)
05. The Middle East – The Darkest Side (28.19)
06. Eluvium – The Motion Makes Me Last (38.04)
07. Final Fantasy – Lewis Takes Action (43.12)
08. Rachael Dadd – Table (50.13)
09. Woodpigeon – Music Belongs to Those Who Make It (56.15)
10. Samamidon – How Come That Blood (62.32)

It’s that time of the week once more, when I pop over to Fresh Air Towers and pollute the airwaves of Edinburgh’s innocent student population with my ranting and rambling for a couple of hours.  Yes, I am on Edinburgh’s student radio station between the hours of 6.30pm and 8pm this evening (British Summer Time, I think)

To listen, go to the Fresh Air homepage and click on the big Listen Live button in the top left.

I’ll update this post with the playlist as I go along, and you should all feel free to chip in with comments here and there, should you have anything to add, or just generally feel abusive.  Oh, and apparently I was voted Best Specialist Show at the awards on Saturday, while I was rather ungratefully off getting pished at Trampoline so, er, sorry guys and thanks very much.

1. Monty Python Theme Song (Oh yes, yes I did!)
2. Cherry Ghost – Mathematics
3. Elk City – Los Cruzados
4. Tom Waits – Just the Right Bullets
5. Barton Carroll – Those Days Are Gone and My Heart is Breaking
6. Helicopter Girl – Cry Mississippi
7. Lucky Jim – Our Troubles End Tonight
8. Sad Day For Puppets – Little Light
9. Haunted House – Rattled Out in Makeup
10. Donny Hue & the Colors – Oh Lord
11. Tom Waits – What Keeps Mankind Alive
12. Eels – Devil’s Dog
13. Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Bananfish Revolution
14. American Music Club – Mantovani the Mind Reader
15. Tom Waits – Bad Liver and a Broken Heart

That’s all for this week, folks.  Tune in again next week, same time, for the last show this semester.

6. Barton Carroll – The Lost One

I know nothing about Barton Carroll, I wasn’t looking forward to this album at all, and then when it landed in my lap I still refused to quite get it for ages; maybe it’s because it’s stylistically quite unadventurous. The big difference, though, is that absolutely every single song on this album, despite flirting with cliche rather frequently, is compelling. They all have you perking up when they come on in their turn, thinking ‘oh good, this song’.
Barton Carroll – Those Days are Gone, and My Heart is Breaking

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7. Donny Hue & the Colors – Tell Tall Tales

This is another album which rather arrived out of nowhere. I wasn’t even aware it was in the pipeline when the promo copy was emailed through in November or so, when the album turned out to be quite so brilliant it was like an early Christmas present. It’s wry and witty, sad and playful and a simple pleasure from start to finish.
Donny Hue & the Colors – Good Time Happening

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8. Bombadil – A Buzz, A Buzz

I liked this album enough all on its own, but when I saw these guys play live at Pickathon in August I was just floored. I haven’t enjoyed a live performance so much in years – it was just overflowing with fun and zest and exuberance, and only the clinically dead could have failed to be swept away.
Bombadil – Cavaliers’ Har Hum

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9. Pale Young Gentlemen – Black Forest (Tra La La)

This is just a fantastically rewarding album to listen to. It’s delicate at times, wistful at others, and thumping at others. It’s also more instrumentally accomplished than pretty much anything else you’ll listen to for a long time.
Pale Young Gentlemen – Coal/Ivory

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10. The Pictish Trail – Secret Soundz Vol. 1

For someone who I’ve seen on stage so many times, and seen play for other people’s bands so many times, this record still still wasn’t anything like what I expected. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this ever-surprising dance from sad to playful to downright bizarre wasn’t it. It’s a cracking record though, almost because it seems so surprising.
The Pictish Trail – Winter Home Disco

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You can forgive an album for getting a little sticky towards the end when the first two-thirds of it are as good as this.  I’m still in a surprisingly country vein at the moment, although this is less smooth than the excellent Christopher Denny.

There’s plenty of archetypal, wistful country music here, at times witty and at times angry or even downright unnerving (Burning Red & Blue).  Slipping from vaguely close to the sort of dustbowl drifter tale that I seem to fall for at every opportunity, to a kind of gentle, rolling alt-country that you could even imagine being wasted on Radio 2, it flirts with being a bit nice, but always maintains enough nasty to keep well away from the saccharine.

It’s odd actually, it’s by no means a sweet, easy country album, but at the same time it rarely has that kind of tense edge that would mark an album as ‘indie’ or ‘alternative’ in that vague and badly-defined classification system I keep stashed away in my gin-addled brain.  He doesn’t write happy songs at all, but there’s little bitterness in his gorgeous delivery which makes for an oddly detached listen.  It sounds more like he’s reading someone else’s stories than recounting anything that might have scarred him personally earlier in his life.

The album does tail off a little towards the end, but to complain about that would be a bit mean-spirited, because until tracks like the mealy Ramona come along, the rest of the album is such a joy you can’t begrudge him the slight lack of stamina.  And, of course, the delivery is good enough that they aren’t jarring anyway, and you can drift off to do whatever it was you were doing before.

Barton Carroll – Brooklyn Girl, You’re Going to Be My Bride
Barton Carroll – Burning Red & Blue

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