I love Randy, but his most celebrated recent song, A Few Words in Defence of Our Country, is a song of two halves for me. The first section is full of witty one liners, and wouldn't be out of place on Sail Away. The second half, starting with "You know, it pisses me off...", however, I don't understand. Can someone with better knowledge of current affairs explain to me what he is getting at?

I have a sneaking suspicion that, for once in his life, he's playing to the gallery, and specifically to the demographic of his fans.

Here's Michael Buble letting rip (autotune not required):

Any others?

As the kids say, LOL...
http://boohewerdinesblogthing.blogspot.com/2010/10/day-235-dreams.html

I just came home to find the Bobby Dylan mono box delivered. I was filled with trepidation at the thought of ripping 9 discs to my Mac. Imagine the joy of finding a card with a download link to save the trouble.

I've just realised I'm probably not going to buy a CD again if this is how I feel. How DOES it feel?

I like it when a song has a sound that is slightly at odds with the subject matter. Chris Rea's Stainsby Girls is a good example; done in the style of Springsteen's Born in the USA, actually a little folk song about the girls from his local school when he was a kid. The big gated snare drum, honking sax solo, but a very small subject. It would mean nothing to someone from the USA, and precious little to people from most of the UK too (mind you, US songwriters do this all the time).

I think it's rather a lovely song:

Any other examples of sounds that are disproportionate to the song content?

Pink Floyd have won a court battle to stop EMI from selling individual tracks from their albums online:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8561963.stm

The previous news story from a couple of days ago also reported that they were pursuing royalties:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8558480.stm

Buried away at the end of the article is the following assertion:
"Pink Floyd's back catalogue is the most lucrative in pop music apart from that of The Beatles."

I find this interesting. Their catalog consists of three massive albums (Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall), a few less well known ones (such as my personal favourite Animals), and a number of complete obscurities such as Obscured By Clouds and More. Therefore I'd say that their sales are largely carried by three records, not sure what this proves, but it seems significant.

I've been ripping a few more CDs to my iTunes library in preparation for fully going digital. In the pile I found Insomniac by Green Day, an album I have never, ever, listened to. How did it get there? It was the third CD in a 3-for-2 offer from HMV a few years back. I picked it because I liked American Idiot and the very short running times of the songs made it look like fun.

I bet everyone else has a fair quantity of makeweights in their collection that came from this same sort of scenario.

Also, this has been lost with the advent of digital stores. They don't have the incentives to dispose of back catalog cheaply.

I'm really enjoying Dave Rawlings' solo debut Friend of a Friend. He's best known as Gillian Welch's sideman/partner, but he's delivered a really solid rootsy bluegrass record here. This clip illustrates his idiosyncratic guitar style, full of on-purpose accidentals (!) :

I'm sure there are other fans on here, but am surprised that the record hasn't received much attention, despite being on the banner advert for a while and having the required beard.

Could someone have a word with Glen Hansard? That picture of him on the banner add is starting to freak me out.

If you have 2 copies of Embryonic, and time to kill, you can play tracks 16 (Silver Trembling Hands) and 17 (Virgo Self Esteem Broadcast) in sync. Start track 17 at 10.5 seconds after track 16. You can do this quite easily in GarageBand (other music software is also available) by dragging the mp3 files in and adjusting the start time with snap to grid turned off. Panning 75% left and right works well.

It's not earth-shattering but you do get a whole other layer to the song with some backing vocals and spooky voices/noises.

I wish I didn't notice things like this.

I had a dream last night, where Pat Sansone, Glenn Kotche and Nels Cline had all quit Wilco. Their sole replacement was an English drummer called Michael Ellcox. They released an album called Ellcox (The Album).

All completely made up by my own fevered imagination, assisted by jet lag, espresso and sleeping pills, not necessarily in that order. Definitely an indication of taking this whole business of music a bit too seriously. Though I must say, it is good that there is still a band around like Wilco where you actually care about who the current lineup is.

Does anyone else have any other examples of this kind of thing? Over to you...