The Song: "Faron Young," Prefab Sprout. Words & music by Paddy McAloon. Track 1 of Steve McQueen, 1985.
When/how acquired: Gift CD, 2007.
Listen/watch here.
Is it just me, or is everyone a little nuts this week? Not saying we don't all have reason, although I suspect that franticness is contagious. I'm just not sure whether it started with me, or whether I caught it from someone and am passing it along. At this point, it doesn't matter.
This album was a Christmas present from a friend, and new to me, although it had been released more than 20 years earlier. It was released in the U.S. as Two Wheels Good, because Steve McQueen's estate objected to the use of his name as a title.
Faron Young was still alive when this album came out, though he hadn't recorded anything since 1980, and was fighting a losing battle with alcohol, emphysema and mental illness. He recorded three more albums in the late 1980s-early 1990s, but as a kid growing up in Tidewater Virginia, I knew him mainly as the spokesman for BC Powder (which, by the way, is still the best hangover remedy I know, though almost impossible to find north of Virginia). He killed himself in 1996, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000.
Click here to see his duet with Willie Nelson on "Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away." It's a beautiful voice, and nice to see the real affection between these two old friends. Faron Young was his own worst enemy, but aren't we all?
4 comments:
So here's the existensial quandry: Does singing the following couplet for 30-plus years make a man cosmically depressed, or does a man need to cosmically depresed to sell this couplet:
"Once more the dawning / wWke up the wanting in me"
Either way, Faron Young (one of my favorites) makes the sentiment weighty instead of comical.
Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eetd5JVGZoI
-- Ed
Thanks for posting that link - I should have posted that song instead of the Willie Nelson duet, since the Prefab Sprout specifically refers to "It's Four in the Morning."
Living and dying in 3/4 time, man.
Gah! Typos.
The lyric is "Once more the dawning / wakes up the wanting in me."
Awesome internal rhyme of "dawning" and "wanting."
-- Ed
11 years later, I find myself on the quest to interpret the lyrics... more specifically the part about every mother's son's Romantic/Frantic. Any idea where this line comes from? I heard the song by Prefab Sprout in rotation on the radio back in the 80's and loved the chorus... but had completely forgotten this song until recently, having heard it while allowing my music streaming app of choice to go into random mode once an album had played through... it then played songs it seemed were similar... and this Faron song came on and I became interested. it's a bit of an ear-worm, yes? I had come late to Prefab Sprout with Jordan the Comeback and then sorta just clung to that as being the start and end until a few years ago when I started getting back into them but still hadn't listened enough to have heard Faron. I do love Trawling the Megahertz though.
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