You should keep an eye on this new singer-songwriter James Blunt. In the first place, you should keep an eye on him because he's doing some good work. I only just heard of him when he played Saturday Night Live three days ago, so I'm still digesting his debut album Back to Bedlam.
In the meantime, I was really struck by the two songs he played on SNL, and feel some urgency of comment for a couple of reasons. The first featured song was a beautiful sad pop song "You're Beautiful." That puppy's hot enough that I feel a strong urge to share.
The second song, however, was rather disturbing. "Goodbye My Lover" is, if anything, an even more stunning melody and construction than the first song. However, this simply presented piano ballad comes from some really dark corner.
This gets to the other half of what I meant by "keeping an eye" on young Master Blunt. Basically, "Goodbye My Lover" is a suicide note- unless you have another explanation for
I cannot live without you.
Goodbye my lover.
Goodbye my friend.
You have been the one.
You have been the one for me
A quick search of Bit Torrents turned up the album at 192 kpbs with the video for "You're Beautiful" conveniently attached.
The "You're Beautiful" video is a suicide. He spends the whole song singing about the perfect girl that he'll never be with, as he's taking off his shoes and methodically emptying his pockets. Then in the final seconds, he takes a flying leap off a thousand foot cliff into the drink.
All in all, Mr Blunt seems to have a strong interest in some freaky narcisstic faux-romantic suicide schtick. It's like the famous Joy Division "Love Will Tear Us Apart." The difference is that Blunt's songs are actually really good songwriting.
Indeed, these songs seem a bit TOO good at the moment, drawing me into freaky emotional territory not part of my usual haunts. I generally don't take a lot of interest in suicidal schoolboy stuff. It's a lot of foolishness, and life's way too short to spend it trying to talk idiots out of checking themselves out.
The Pursuit of Happiness put it memorably in "I'm an Adult Now," taking the view that he should avoid a dumb death cause "I'd sure look like a fool, dead in a ditch somewhere with a brain full of chemicals like some cheese-eatin' high school boy."
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Al, much as this article was brilliant, much as i'm happy for your discovery, i cannot for a second believe you just compared Blunt to Kurt Cobain. this chancer represents a fradulent, cynical, deeply nauseating attempt to grab hold a that market share dominated by authentically fucked-up individuals. this is just horrible, cloying, incredibly sloppy pish. i rarely get worked up about any sorta musical tomfoolery, if i don't like it the hell does it matter, but this is just too horrifically calculated to let pass without puking. he's the acoustic My Chemical Romance. absoloutely terrible. again, great article though.
2 - Al Barger
Duke my brother, do they have peanut butter in Ireland? You seem to have something clogging up your ears here.
Your argument is extraneous to the music, that Mr Blunt is not an "authentically fucked-up individual." So, you're saying that he's not really suicidal, so he's illegitimate. Why, this is the biggest scandal since I found out that Gordon MacRae from Oklahoma! wasn't really a singing cowboy.
I hope you're right that Blunt is a "fraud" in that sense. I'd like him to stick around and write some more of these hot tunes.
I don't know nor care his personal business, but there's nothing fraudulent about those melodies. Them things are real.
3 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
heh, Al, you got me chucklin again. you're right, in fact, his intent should have nothin to do with the appreciation of the music in question. i just find it especially bland and uncompellin, i supose. but certainly there are melodies a man could trip over. i just prefer to stay far away from the fella's over-produced cynical nonsense. but, then again, You're Beautiful was all over the damn radio here in the UK for the best part a this year, so obviously i'm in the minority. an Q Magazine voted the album one of the top ten of the year. who am i to argue?
4 - Alisha Karabinus
I think Al is in love with this guy. It's all he's talked about lately. Well, that and other crazy nonsense like hitting stuff with machinery.
Duke, you're objective-sorta, and you've been plagued by this guy all year on radio-across-the-sea. Despite the underlying is he/isn't he argument, is this fellow worth a listen?
5 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Alisha, the only thing i can offer by way of advice is maybe if you like David Grey (and i do, incidentally) an that sorta commercial, singer-songwriter type vibe, then you might find this at least moderately pleasing. folks are goin mad in the eyes for that "you're beautiful" song, and "high" is all over the damn tv now. it's more of a coldplay-type affair, far as i can be bothered to deduce. i find it deeply offensively lackin in soul, but the tunes ARE rather swell, no denying that.
6 - Alisha Karabinus
Nah, can't say as I really like David Grey all that much, but if Al keeps harping about this guy, I might give him a listen. Maybe. But from what you say, I'm thinking it's not my kinda deal, really.
Thanks!
7 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
heh, al's gonna kill me for hijackin this thread! to make amends, i will say, if Al sends you, say, "you're beautiful" via some method, give it a listen. if you don't like it, stop there. if you do, well, maybe you'll dig the record. who knows?
8 - Alisha Karabinus
Oh, Al can get right over it and stop his whining, 'cause whining it will be. But, ah, I might well already have a copy of said song, through... well, let's call them perfectly legitimate channels, because we're talking about the copy I might have in an alternate universe, eh? :)
9 - Christopher Rose
AL: I understand "You're Beautiful" was written for some movie. That prolly explains something that annoys most every one I know: in the first verse he sees her with someone else but doesn't worry cos "I got a plan". By the end of the song he's all "I know I'll never be with you".
So what happened to the fucking plan, Al? What happened to the plan?
Feeling better now; anybody know what movie it is?
He was a soldier in Bosnia or somewhere and that experience has informed his songwriting but I've yet to hear any other songs. Yet...
10 - Al Barger
The lyric of "You're Beautiful" makes sense to me. The basic point was that he's kidding himself to think that he had a chance, which is acknowledged in the chorus. That makes close enough to sense for rock and roll.
11 - rob
James Blunt sucks. That's the long and the short of it. Kurt Cobain was 10,000 times the musician Blunt will ever be. He's a terrible singer and an even worse songwriter. The only thing I'll give him credit for is the ability to pass of his garbage music as "art" - and to sucker the world into buying it.
12 - Al Barger
Rob, there's always some room for disagreement, and it's cool if Blunt doesn't do it for you. However, you're needing to clean your ears out when you say, "Kurt Cobain was 10,000 times the musician Blunt will ever be. He's a terrible singer and an even worse songwriter." On any reasonable basis of their work, that statement is simply ridiculous. Cobain was not a good singer, and Nirvana were notoriously lousy musicians.
Plus, Cobain had stunted growth as a songwriter. That was his strong suite, but he was too obsessed with self-destruction and actually killing himself to apply himself to his craft- thus the disjointed nonsense that passed for lyrics in his songs. I know that Cobain's supposed to be the King of Pain and "Teen Spirit" is considered a big classic, but it's nowhere near as good a piece of songcraft as "You're Beautiful." It's just not, no matter how authentic Cobain's suffering. (Hey, nobody FORCED him to marry Courtney Love.)
13 - Christopher Rose
AL: Thanks for turning me on to that song "Goodbye My Lover", which is indeed a thing of beauty, indeed I'm not embarrassed to say I cried and furthermore, I may one day record it myself to play to my wife at my funeral!
However, you can call off the suicide watch, a friend says it was written for a girlfriend who died. I don't know more details on that.
As for "You're Beautiful", I have to switch sides on this one. Nobody I know, male or female, can stand this song, partly 'cos he starts off all confident at the beginning:-
"She was with another man.
But I won't lose no sleep on that,
'Cause I've got a plan"
and only 2 minutes later he's all pathetic:-
"I saw your face in a crowded place,
And I don't know what to do,
'Cause I'll never be with you".
What happened to the plan, Al? What happened to the plan?
14 - HateBlunt
James Blunt is shit, he needs taken out
15 - HateBlunt
Quote Al:
"as he's taking off his shoes and methodically emptying his pockets. Then in the final seconds, he takes a flying leap off a thousand foot cliff into the drink."
If only he did we would all by saved from his whiney, pre-fabricated rubbish.
he needs to GO!!!
16 - Lord Toucan
James Blunt is the end result of years of attempts by the United Kingdom to create the perfect music-killing machine. He and his Army of soft rock rejects (Coldplay, Keane, David Grey, Travis etc) will not stop until real music has been wiped off the face of the earth.
We have to stop them.
17 - DJRadiohead
Al, this is a really well-written review. I just fuckin hated that "You're Beautiful" song and video. The reason he'll never be with that beautiful bird is because he's a whiny, pansy wanker who needs a serious case of puberty.
All right, enough of that from me. I do think you wrote a good piece. I just didn't like the song very much or the guy's voice. I guess I should just leave it there.
18 - Al Barger
It's interesting that "You're Beautiful" specifically seems to be drawing much negative reaction, even among some folk like Chris who really like some of the other songs.
DJRadiohead, I appreciate your meta-point about the song, but you can't deny that melody.
19 - Christopher Rose
Actually Al, I've only heard the two songs and I really don't want to listen to that other one again unless and until i've got me a serious heartbreaking flashback thing going on. I'd definitely put "Goodbye My Lover" on my personal greatest sad songs collection though. Sob!
20 - Jimmy Riddle
Mr Barger,
I believe you should seek specialist advice if you like James "C-word" Blunt. He is an utter tosser, who perpetrates some of the shittiest music ever produced - and that's not just the booze talking.
"you're beautiful" is like a shit-stain on the wall of the british music industry, and has damaged the british youth in ways we may never understand.
Destroy Destroy Destroy
21 - source of untruth
The blunt-scum killed women and children in his pillaging of reading in 1960, and can no only sate his blood-lust by disemboweling virgins every tuesday - its true - and if he looks in a mirror, he doesn't have any reflection - all he can see is a washed-up talentless shitbag that should be shot, so he thinks "that can't be right" and goes off and buys a more expensive one, but then forgets because he has to snort coke off a gerbil and destroy music and then he wants to bugger a whole primary school before matins and gary glitter them up like fuck.
Nature made him that way.
22 - more hate
I have a shiny sixpence for the plucky fellow who can bring me the head of james fuck.
23 - Al Barger
Folks, listen to this chorus of people testifying above on the power of James Blunt. Jimmy Riddle, Source of Untruth, and More Hate all testify to the extraordinary power of this music. Look at the apparent depth of the emotional effect on these individuals. That they find the mirror that Blunt turns on their lives unbearable is not, I posit, Mr Blunt's fault, but only their own. But even lashing out in their pain More Hate et al are giving witness to the powerful emotional effect that James Blunt has.
24 - reggie von woic
Who would've thought? A guy from the army with such a melodic high voice.
The video to 'you're beautiful' was excellent--simple, makes sense, and has everything to do with the song itself. Little sad though...kinda romantic too.
25 - gonzo marx
ummm..so he should have snorted Drain-O and drunk bleach?
and i listened...then deleted, childish chord choices and major keys don't work for me
your mileage may vary
Excelsior!