Thursday, July 05, 2007

Now That's A Pretty Song

A Marriage Made In Hollywood, by Paul Brady, from the album Spirits Colliding. The vocals soar, the guitar-work is restrained and clean, the mix is damn-near perfect for the Stevie-ears, the song is melodic and the lyrics are clever. Why this guy hasn't taken the popular music world by storm is beyond me, since this singer-songwriter has what it takes in spades.

I bought the Spirits Colliding album after a fairly long search process. I was fascinated by the theme music and incidental music snippets (which turned out to be extracts from the theme) of a British comedy show called "Faith in the Future" if memory serves, but could never read who wrote it as the credits raced over my field of vision. I eventually managed to catch the credit for the music as it zoomed across the screen of my TV by videotaping the show on a top-of-the-line Sony machine with superb freeze frame and jog-shuttle capability, then playing the credits back one frame at a time. Then I made Mr Brain remember the name Paul Brady by visualising my friend Paul the Globetrotting Wargamer and the splash screen for the Brady Bunch (which is all I've ever seen of that show) and went a-huntin'1.

The album that the theme music (The World Is What You Make It) is on was quite hard to find, but I turfed it up eventually in Splurgin Records.

And had my socks blown off when I ran it through my CD player.

It was one of those extremely rare finds, an album that was bought for one track and that track turns out to be the least interesting on the disc. In my opinion I don't think there's a clunker on this album. Every track stands out as a wonderful addition to my collection of over 500 CDs and I have no hesitation in recommending that either of my readers run straight to their nearest browser and buy it for themselves online.

I was employed to build and maintain several small websites at the time, and I did 90% of the design work for the most challenging one while listening to this album. I still use it to help me concentrate when the going gets tough, and when Paul the Globetrotting Wargamer gave me the Steve Harley recording that was the subject of the very first "Pretty Song" posting in this blog, I pissed him off royally by shelving his gift2 and insisting he listen, no really listen to Spirits Colliding.

It turned out that I had been a fan of Paul Brady for some time before I got this recording too. Years ago I bought a cassette version of an album I wish to heck I had had the foresight to get on decent media, a sampler called "The Transatlantic Years" which had a couple of keepers on it, including a variant of Ralph McTell's Spiral Staircase and my favourite track, Continental Trailways Bus by The Johnsons. When I read the sleeve notes to Spirits Colliding I found out that the lead singer and the guitarist who did the stuff I really liked on Continental Trailways Bus was Paul Brady.

And you really should listen, no really listen to his album, Spirits Colliding3.

  1. If I don't resort to rebus-like techniques for stuff like this, Mr Brain carefully files the data in the Mental Wastebasket of Forgetting Stuff
  2. And what a scorcher of an album that was too. When I realised what he had given me I felt like a git for not listening, no really listening, to his kind and now much-prized gift when he gave it to me
  3. So why don't you link to these so-called "Pretty Songs"? I hear you ask. Surely if you want me to go out and spend my hard-earned cashmoney on some pile of drool, he least you can do is give me a link to it.

    To which I reply: If you can't figure out how to use Google for yourself to locate the fine examples of musical talent that I painstakingly locate and point out to you, you certainly don't possess the wherewithal to properly appreciate the sheer superbness of the works themselves

    And don't call me Shirley ( oblig.)

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