"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
Another semi-cheat - I had a Richard & Linda Thompson song in the This Year series, but not one by Richard solo. Given that his career has been so long and so full of great music, I feel it's justified to give him another slot under a slightly different name.
Even only counting my five-star songs, there are thirteen to wrestle with, to pick from. Would it be the stark Hope You Like the New Me? Any one of the three excellent versions of Cooksferry Queen? The amusing Let It Blow? The angry Dad's Gonna Kill Me?
No - for Thompson solo, I had to go with Outside of the Inside. Maybe just for that perfect opening couplet:
God never listened to Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker lived in vain
This is a song from a point of view, sung by Thompson but not him "speaking." The speaker is some variety of religious fanatic, cataloging all the things that are unneeded in the world because of his faith.
What's the point of Albert Einstein?
What do we need physics for?
And
Shakespeare, Isaac Newton
Small ideas for little boys
And
Van Gogh, Botticelli
Scraping paint onto a board
Color is the fuel of madness
That's no way to praise the Lord
It's a stark, uncompromising vision, one of the best evocations of the fundamentalist mindset in popular culture, enlivened by Thompson's acerbic voice and magnificent guitar playing. It is uncompromising but never breaks character, like Thompson's best work.
And when I get to heaven
I won't realize that I'm there
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