Monday morning’s earworm №50
Cruel to be Kind by Nick Lowe
What is an earworm?
It’s a snatch or a snippet, a captured fragment, a line or two, or maybe a bit more, that stays in your head and keeps bubbling up accompanying your day.
It’s part of the language of your landscape that stays in your mind, whether it’s one single line, a couplet or maybe a whole verse, from a poem or song, or a part of a speech from a play, or a quote from a book, or something you heard somebody say, that won’t let you go.
Sometimes it won’t involve what we call language in the everyday. It could be purely a musical phrase that plays on your time, on a loop that follows you through day and night.
That’s what an earworm is. And so is this…
Cruel to be Kind by Nick Lowe
Released August 1979. UK Chart peak: 12. US Chart peak: 12.
Rose-tinted Spectacles
This is another one of those songs I can’t see through anything but the Rose-tinted Spectacles of youth- not that I wore them at the time.
Like the featured song a couple of weeks ago, “I Knew the Bride” by his Rockpile bandmate, Dave Edmunds, it lives suspended in the breathlessly enthusiastic glow of my…
