corianderstem
Blue Crack Distributor
I vote yes. Book of Your Heart and the string version of Lights of Home are worth a few extra bucks.
It's fine. Better than the garbage they put out as singles.
I'd probably shed Lights of Home and Love is Bigger and add in Book of Your Heart, providing a lovely little collection of 10 decent enough songs.
Love Is Bigger is one of the 6-8 salvageable songs across both albums.
The Showman definitely needs to go with that horrendous chorus it has. Just eww.
Yes, removing two of the album's best songs is a brilliant idea. Let's also remove WOWY and One Tree Hill from JT to make room for Luminous Times.
I've been sitting on this for a while, unsure if I'd made the right choices, cuz this was a hard one to do compared to previous album.
1. Love Is All
2. Love Is Bigger
3. The Best Thing
4. The Showman
5. [Preacher's Blessing] *(see below)
6. American Soul
7. The Blackout
8. Summer Of Love
9. Red Flag Day
10. Landlady
11. Book Of Your Heart
12. The Little Things
13. Lights Of Home (string version)
14. There Is A Light
I tried to move most of the catchier up to the front, I think the Love-Love and Light-Light pairings make good thematic bookends, and Love Is Bigger just makes more sense coming off Love Is All. Both it and Lights Of Home are similar in that thematically they can work as mission statements as well as summations, so I went with what sounded more appropriate.
So you have the more personal but upbeat section in the first movement, followed by the political. I absolutely despise Get Out, but I didn't want to lose the bulk of Kendrick's speech. Luckily a new guitar line begins near the end of Get Out before he appears and if you set iTunes to start the track at 3:32:5 it picks up right there and doesn't sound abrupt at all. If for some reason you are able to stomach Get Out, I think it works fine here anyway because it fits on the release version. The Blackout's raw guitar opening segues great coming off the end of American Soul, but its ending is moodier, which makes a nice transition to Summer Of Love. Red Flag Day is a similar groove-based track so I didn't mess with that original pairing. The guitars on Red Flag and Landlady seemed complementary (the latter minus percussion at first), and since there is a romantic element in both I thought it fair to bridge those two as we move back to the personal for the album's final section. Landlady going into Book of Your Heart puts the two Ali/marriage songs together and since Book sounds so different sonically from the rest of the album I think it works best out of the relatively sparse Landlady, and its nighttime vibe goes into the long dark night of the soul depicted in The Little Things.
I never felt Love Is Bigger was enough of a showstopper number for the penultimate slot because of its too-brief crescendo and then the reprise of the introductory oh-oh-ohs robbing it of a feeling of finality. In its place as mentioned above I put Lights of Home, with the string mix giving it a sense of drama that makes it perfect for its slot. It has an equally rousing sing-along like Love Is Bigger, but is allowed to continue longer, and then you have the string outro which just sounds more appropriate for the end of an album. Last you have the typical downbeat coda of There Is A Light, which doesn't fit anywhere else and is IMO a great closer in terms of its sound and thematics.
I got my CD as well.
I’m having a really hard time reading the liner notes, especially Bono’s letter. I tried, but eventually gave up.
Is it because the font and colour scheme make it difficult to read? Or am I getting old? I choose the former.