Barefoot Contessa - but not the film or the food show!

To whoever has been looking for a track list for the 1995 self-titled début album Barefoot Contessa; I can't find that information either. I do now know that it has nine tracks and, while released on label 'Indy 500', it does not appear to be available new at the moment. I can find a number of copies available but they are not cheap, starting at about £35 ($50). It is an album I'd like to have but in the current circumstances I'm not prepared to pay that much for a CD.

Thanks to a recent 'anonymous' comment here is the track list:

Barefoot Contessa - Barefoot Contessa (1995)

Eve
Saved
Such Sweet Sorrow
Gone Too Soon For My Time
Carnal Knowledge
To Be Continued
How Can You Say You Really Feel
The Big Lie
No Means Yes

Here, however, are what I currently believe to be (singles excepted) the recordings of Barefoot Contessa:

• 1995 Barefoot Contessa
• 1996 You Can't Go Home Again
• 1997 Happy Together EP
• 1999 Blues For A Honey
• 2001 Oh The Sweet Power

Apart from the aforementioned all are fairly readily available at a reasonable price. I mentioned 'Blues For A Honey' earlier this year. When it comes to albums that, while not new releases, were new to me in 2008 it remains amongst the most played.

My apologies to everyone looking for the lyrics to a number of albums - including those by Imelda May and Jill Jackson - that I promised I would post a month or so back. I've just been too busy to sit down and work them out from the CD. I hope to get it done over the holiday season. That brings me to another issue: artists that might become big in 2009.
Last year it seemed fairly obvious to me but not this year. Does anyone have any guesses?

Why is it that... ?

I can't believe that it is only me that seems to find it that, when I can find a load of new or forthcoming albums that I really want, it then suddenly becomes far easier to find a load more much older ones, often seemingly ones quite unrelated to the desired new releases and each other, that I had either not heard of or had simply chosen to disregard before?
I know that it is not a one-off event because it has happened several times in the last few years. Typically in the late summer and early autumn, when the new releases are a mixture of those by acts I already know well and those by altogether new ones, the pattern is familiar but also quite inexplicable.
It is not a problem because it works out well and the albums that I discover as a result of this phenomenon tend to remain amongst my favourites, even if atypical in overall terms. They probably therefore have a disproportionate - but to me indefinable - influence on the music I might consider in the following six months or so. This apparently annoying contradiction is actually the very best thing about the situation - it is because I can't explain, and not for want of trying, what it means and why I suddenly like this or that music that it is actually so important! For much of last September I only really liked one album and that was I Wish I Could Have Loved You More - Candie Payne. Any reasonable conclusion would be that, at the very least, I am now rather bored of it - but I'm not and neither does it have the negative connotation that might be expected! It is not yet understood why, but music and the human brain are somehow inextricably linked and to understand either would certainly be a huge step on the way to understanding the other.
As I'm unable to do that here are a few albums that, given this tendency, I've recently acquired...

Flying Away - Smoke City (1999)

Often classed as trip-hop, and there certainly is that in it, but it has suffered not a bit for the fact that is now almost a decade old, nor does it bear much resemblance to the original, and often rather exquisitly downbeat, Bristol trip-hop vision. If dance music really is going to make a mark in 2010, then this would probably be a very good place to start. Digital bleeps, analogue electronica, Brazilian influences, disco-pop sensibility and fantastic vocals by Nina Miranda (sometimes sung in French) and... for goodness sake, acoustic guitar. It all seems perfectly 2009 to me.
That makes more sense than it seems, the acoustic guitar providing a link with another influence that has become prominent in the last couple of years. The rise and rise of folk, folk-related and folk-influenced music continues unabated and, while it is easy to find a dozen and more acts of this kind that have featured in this blog in the last nine months, this is an older album that I've finally got around to buying.

Blues For A Honey - Barefoot Contessa (1998)

Not cheerful perhaps, but certainly acoustic and modern - nu-folk almost a decade ahead of its time - and this album really should be better known. However an easier place to start is perhaps the 2006 album Routines. The singer is Helene Dineen (vocals, lyrics) who did the same in Barefoot Contessa, which also included Graham Gargiulo (guitars, keyboards) and when it comes to the crunch few songs can hold a candle to 'Superanything'


She limped to the door
She was kicked into touch
She would've run out yesterday
But it all had got too much
There are worse things in the world
Couldn'a happened to a nicer girl
I felt sorry but I had
Other things on my mind - too bad!

There's a light-hearted feel
To things these days
It's superanything

There's a light-hearted feel
To things these days -
Will it carry mine away?
And all those achy-fakey
Steel-hearted bitch-tunes.
All in the spirit
Of everyone having their say.
I called the bad-taste brigade
I had them all arraigned.
I said it so it must be true
I am here to bring
Wisdom and courage to you
Ha!

There's a light-hearted feel
To things these days
Oh superanything.

Trust to your family to fit you up
Watched the way mine fucked things up
Cut myself on some grit from the pan
Opened me up just enough...
To let in another bad man.

There's a light-hearted feel
To things these days
Oh superany... thing.

To finish this particular trio here is another, from 2001, that perhaps serves as some kind of link between the forgoing, between the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie and acts such as Stephanie Dosen and Fleet Foxes now signed to Bella Union Records in the UK.

Roulette - Violet Indiana (2001)

Sammy is a soldier now...

As we are now in a period of global political and economic uncertainty, and one certainly afflicted by rising energy and commodity prices coupled with falling property values, surely there has to be something to look forward to?
That, I would contest, is music as it seems to have flourished during other similar episodes of uncertainty.

Sammy sleeps alone at night.
She says the world owes her a life.
When she was only five years old
She wouldn't do what she was told
But, when she got to ten
She learned to rein it in.

She knew she'd done something wrong.
She'd never do it again.

But it is so hard to keep the promises you make
And it's so hard to love when all you feel is hate.
Sammy lives in magazines,
She's searching for the perfect jeans.
She'd like to be clean as the sky
Outside and inside; no-one to depend on.

No family or foes, no-one to tell her
What she already knows.

She always says who needs that stuff anyhow?
She once was weak but she's a soldier now.

Major label release?

Definitely not, but that is not to say that Routines - Helene isn't a fine album for the here and now, despite the fact that it was released (Series 8, as SER 001 CD) in 2006, and if the track 'Sammy Is A Soldier Now' was the only good track on it that would still be quite something.
Luckily it isn't, far from it in fact, and not least because 'This Is All We Have To Know' is another very special song, again about growing up, yet cast in a very different light.

The whole album is really good and you should still be able to find it at a reasonable price. If you like it then the previous album, Postcard, and her earlier work with the band 'Barefoot Contessa' might also be of interest.
You might regard it all as slightly gloomy but I would hold that as suitable, given the current mood, because it is not overly depressing either. I could suggest a few other recent contenders in this category too, but so can you...

Please let me know!