Size doesn't matter: Elbow's Giants Of All Sizes

With time on my hands, I've taken to perusing Elbow's press coverage on the occasion of their eighth and latest album, Giants Of All Sizes, finding its way into the world. And so, a casual Google galavant reveals a predilection for journalists to make reference to Guy Garvey's avuncular nature. "Cuddly", is an oft-repeated description, along with "bear-like", which all border on sizeist judgement of the bearded 45-year-old from Bury. Quite what Craig Potter, his brother Mark, and Pete Turner, the band's other members, feel about this is not known, but it's common for a band with a charismatic lead singer and chief lyricist, to attract most, if not all, of the attention. Peter Gabriel (one of Garvey's musical idols) built up similar internal resentment when lead singer of Genesis, to such extent that Phil Collins has been quoted as saying that they were in danger of being known as "Peter Gabriel and Genesis".

Why this is relevant is that despite Garvey's apparent ursine appeal, Elbow's eighth and latest album, Giants Of All Sizes is, according to the band, anything but cuddly. "It's certainly not an uplifting album," Garvey recently told a journalist, explaining that the band wanted to make an album reflective of both their mood, as well as the mood of the times. That doesn't mean a lot of ambient Thom Yorke-style droning in a minor key, however: at essence, Giants is still an Elbow album, with the warmth of Garvey's voice binding a band comfortable in its own musical skin, experimenting with sounds and instrumentation without going too far, mood without being too Enoesque. But within that experimentation and instrumentation there is certainly a darker tonality, even from the off, with opener Dexter & Sinister and its disjointed time signatures and non sequitur breaks addressing a number of things on Garvey's mind, from Brexit to bereavement (including the death of his father) and, in his own words, "the general sense of disaffection you see all-around at the moment". The track rings the keynote for the rest of the album, one which draws on a certain Lancastrian bleakness that has run through all their work, as it does with their great mates Doves and I Am Kloot. That's not a lazy southern trope, but think about it. I've never been entirely sure whether it is to do with geography, like the rain-soaked cobbles of Coronation Street, or something else, but it's there in almost everything coming out of the north-west, The Beatles' childlike acts of whimsy notwithstanding.

Musically, some might find Giants musically narrow, nine songs with a very similar range and notably lacking in the sort of anthemic bluster that made the nation fall in love with them via the album Seldom Seen Kid and their closing ceremony performance at the London Olympics in 2012, where One Day Like This seemed to supplant Land Of Hope And Glory in the nation's communal singing preferences. Frankly, though, this lack of width makes for a better album, one which accentuates the combination of Garvey's voice with Turner's at times McCartneyesque bass, Potter (C)'s keyboard washes and Potter (M)'s understated guitar work. Despite being more compressed and lyrically reflective than either Build A Rocket Boys! or The Take Off And Landing Of Everything, Elbow's last de facto albums, Giants is nonetheless immediately accessible, even when tackling some of its weightier subjects, such as the undertone of Brexit in Empires, with its fairground Wurlitzer stabs part of a layered fabric interwoven with such existential questions as "How can a bland unremarkable typical Tuesday be Day of the Dead?".  Others, like The Delayed 3.15, with its string section find melodic companionship with some of the less bonkers elements of prog rock, a musical genre often misunderstood and invariably mocked, but which had more in common with jazz as anything else. Doldrums even points back to prog's true origins, with a decidedly Beatles-like groove and Garvey's vocal treble-tracked to the extent it sounds like they were recorded in a broom cupboard. As a result, it's a track that, strangely enough, benefits from being listened to on headphones. The band's assertion that this is a bleak album is a bit of a misnomer, but paying close attention to the lyrics throughout reveals the true state of Garvey's mind. White Noise White Heat, for example, provides a stark reflection on the nightmare of Grenfell Tower and the injustices handed down to its victims, wrenching the song's emotional heft further with strings and brass. It is, perhaps, the closest Giants gets to a "soaring"™anthem like One Day Like This, should that be what you'd buy an Elbow album for.

If I might return to Garvey's avunicularity, it stems from his voice. With his Bury accent heavily inflected in the delivery, each song rings with autumnal comfort, no more so than the beautiful My Trouble, with the vocal perfectly mixed over a combination of bass, strings and the subtlest of drum machine rhythm tracks, building to a hymn-like chorus of "Come get me/Guide and check me/Sail and wreck me/Soak me to my skin." I defy anyone not to sing along at the top of their voice while driving along to it.

At the arrival of On Deronda Road, the penultimate song, I reached the point where I realised why I find Giants Of All Sizes so accessible. It's not because this particular song is notably catchy, there are no obvious hit-making hooks, and in some respects it's a somewhat brief interlude. No, it's the realisation that I'm listening to something from Trick Of The Tail-era Genesis. Now, don't baulk at that suggestion (trust me, naysayers, it's a quality album), but the vocal harmonies and textures hark back to that 1976 album's most beautiful moments, in particular, Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford's 12-string guitars producing something ethereal on songs like Entangled and Ripples. In fact, this vibe continues with the closing track of Giants, Weightless, which takes inspiration from both the death of Garvey's father and the continuation of life with the birth of his son. It is a truly beautiful song and easily one of the best Elbow have committed over the course of their eight albums. Whether by design of sequencing or simply the way it fell out of the writing process, Weightless concludes an album written around gloomier themes with a sense of uplift, of hope and admission that, maybe, the world isn't all bad. Or, perhaps, Garvey is driving at a bleak future for his offspring. Either way, it's a song of balanced grace.

When not making Guy Garvey out to be some sort of Lancastrian Yogi Bear, media reaction to Giants Of All Sizes has been a little mixed. Some reviewers have (quite rightly) claimed it to be Elbow's best yet, while others are still just not sure. My view is that it is brilliantly intriguing, musically, and obliquely reflective, lyrically. If this is a key test to go by, I listened to it on repeat for most of Saturday afternoon, hearing something new each time, pulling it closer like a warm blanket on a cold, wet October afternoon, a comfort no Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks will ever fulfil.

Put the needle on the record...

(Picture: Naomi Davison)

In a week that began with the ever-youthful Gary Crowley talking about his 40 years listening to, playing and talking about music, one which continued with the premiere of a documentary about singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe's idiosyncratic approach to making music tangible, Saturday arrives with a celebration of the album itself. For today is the second annual National Album Day, a combined UK initiative of the BPI, the Entertainment Retailers Association and the Association of Independent Music, designed to embrace all that is good, still, about the album as a complete body of musical work.

It comes at a time of continuing mixed emotions about how we consume our music. Just last week I reviewed Sheryl Crow’s album Threads which, she says, is likely to be her last due to the changing consumption model of consumers effectively sequencing their own listening via the pic’n’mix of streaming services. And, yet, at the same time, the 50th anniversary re-release of The Beatles’ Abbey Road went straight into the album chart at No.1 when it was released two weeks ago, something of a reaffirmation of the album format from the very band which, according to music journalist David Hepworth, invented the LP with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 52 years ago.

According to National Album Day's organisers, the album as a packaged piece of music remains a robust proposition. 143 million albums, they say, were either streamed, downloaded or purchased in the UK in 2018, a 6% increase on 2017 and worth approximately £1.3 billion. A healthy state of affairs, it must be said, and made shinier by the 4.2 million vinyl LPs sold last year, although this must be still seen as just under 3% of the overall number of albums shifted, even if representing a 25-year high for the format.

Where all these sales are coming from is, actually, hard to identify: friends of mine who used to be dyed-in-the-wool record buyers are now just as likely to be listening to new albums via Spotify, unfussed by either the lack of tactile interaction or the reduced fidelity created by streaming compression. And, yet, the notion that young consumers are eschewing albums-whole for the selectivity of YouTube on mobile-friendly platforms could equally be a misnomer, if the experience of accompanying my 14-year-old step-daughter into Kingston’s Banquet Records recently was anything to go by. What may, though, be preventing today’s teenagers from replicating how I began my record collection at the same age may simply be economics. Paying more than £20 for a vinyl record is certainly beyond most pocket money budgets if serious collation is going to take place.

Visiting the HMV at Bluewater yesterday it was notable how much vinyl had crept back into a shop space that would, as recently as a couple of years ago been occupied by CDs. However, here lies the peculiarity of HMV’s continued survival strategy: the Bluewater shop's most prominent racks contained a strange mixture of new and old - Elbow’s brand new album Giants Of All Sizes sat next to ‘staff picks’ like Steely Dan’s Aja. Nothing wrong with either of those records (and stay tuned for my own review of the Elbow release), but there was an incongruity in what was prominent and what wasn’t. Elsewhere yesterday HMV - the chain that less than a year ago called in administrators for the second time in a decade, resulting in dozens of branch closures - opened its biggest ever retail space, ‘The Vault’ in Birmingham. Covering 25,000 square feet, it promises to be a “nirvana for music and film fans”, with dedicated spaces for vinyl, CDs, Blu-ray Discs and DVDs, as well as a stage for in-store performances. It is a brave move by the chain: even when musicians themselves are seeing their own incomes challenged by the relatively meagre returns from online music services (most make more money these days from touring than they do from releasing records), music retailing via so-called ‘bricks and mortar’ outlets is under threat from the twin terrors of high rents and the likes of Amazon.

In this mix lies the emotional act of buying a record. If you can buy an album for £1 less on Amazon and without the hassle of going out to buy it or the add-on costs of bus fares or car parking, plus that latte in Costa you weren’t planning but had anyway, record shops are heading for an even darker future. That places like Kingston’s Banquet and my favourite, Casbah Records in Greenwich, still appear to be thriving - if challenged by prevailing ‘market conditions’ - is a welcome throwback. HMV’s owner Doug Putnam still believes the need for a physical, tangible music consumption experience is driving their belief in opening a store like The Vault. “We know that people want to stream music when they're out, but also want to physically go in store and purchase something special, something they love, to add it to their collection at home,” he told the BBC.

"We all want human interaction but do we want to pay for it?", countered retail analyst Richard Hyman. "I think [The Vault] is a very courageous venture but it'll need more than courage to make the economics stack up." There is a view that I share that record shops are being kept open by two factors: firstly, old heads like me, clinging on to physical music ownership much as their hairlines recede and their waistlines expand, and secondly, younger consumers being drawn to the niche experience of buying ‘a vinyl’. Certainly a visit, the other Saturday, to Soho’s Sister Ray Records supported the first of these views, judging by the exclusively male, middle-aged clientele.

Their interest, I’m sure, is much like mine - the discovery of albums as complete experiences. It’s why this year’s National Album Day - which is being championed by Elbow themselves, Lewis Capaldi and Mark Ronson - is focusing on the theme of ‘Don’t Skip’, to encourage the discovery and enjoyment of albums as total bodies of work, to be consumed from first to last track as a single, arcing narrative. It’s the consumption experience that David Hepworth drew from with his brilliant tome A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives, which traces the evolution of the LP through his own experience, his eyes being opened by 1967’s Sgt. Pepper, before seeing it disappear with the advent of the CD and its remote-controlled skipability. ‘Long playing records’ had existed way before The Beatles’ opus but, argued Hepworth, Pepper turned the LP into something other than a vestibule for songs, a package of listening and looking. It was probably the first concept album, launching a series of ‘themed’ records from ever more progressive artists, including The Beatles themselves, but also The Who with Pete Townshend’s rock operas, Tommy and Quadrophenia, Bowie and his recurring astronautical subplots, and of course the prog giants like King Crimson and Pink Floyd, each presenting music as theatrical suites.

Hepworth’s book got to the nub of the album buying experience. It may be considered a cliche to think of nerdish types in record shops pouring over the everlasting trope of gatefold sleeves and Storm Thorgerson cover art, but it was (and still is) part of the total act of ownership, right up to and including the moment the needle was placed on the intro groove, to flipping over to Side 2 and then watching the stylus go back and forth on the outro groove. Hepworth’s description of shared house ownership and the obsession of male housemates with speaker cables and hi-fi separates is certainly one I can appreciate. I’m still a hi-fi separates man to this day. Hepworth, however, saw the beginning of the end for this experience when he first encountered a Sony Walkman when interviewing Stewart Copeland in 1980. If he wasn’t all that enamoured by Sony’s miniaturised music experience, with its tinny headphones, the next few years, with CDs and the arrival of MTV, sounded the death knell for Hepworth for the album as that total, beginning-middle-end experience. Selective consumption had now arrived. Skip-play technology had done for the album. “You can fill your room with the very best loudspeakers,” Hepworth concluded in his book. “You can spend your money on a pristine new copy of your favourite album. It can be produced on the highest quality vinyl. It can feel reassuringly weighty in your hand,” he says of today’s ‘new’ vinyl experience. The really difficult bit, he says whimsically, “will be convincing yourself that for the next 40 minutes you have nothing better to do than listen to that record. Because that’s how it was back in the golden age of the LP. It seemed as though we had all the time in the world.”

Perhaps we have lost patience. Perhaps the instant reassurance some have from looking at their phones every ten seconds is a sign that we have become digitally restless. Strange, then, that the Netflix and Amazon model is largely catered towards those who can binge through hours of box sets in a single sitting. Why we can’t do that with albums, I can’t say, although I could very easily, given the opportunity. As I write this I’m currently on the second consecutive and complete listen to Elbow’s Giants Of All Sizes. Perhaps it’s a rare luxury to be able to do so on a Saturday afternoon, but it’s how I’ve always preferred to hear albums, even delaying getting out of the car to finish up the final track of a CD. From first to final, before repeating and listening all over again, that’s the correct way to do it.

“Some artists see the album as a collection of short stories,” Elbow themselves say in the official National Album Day press release. “We see the album as a novel. Songs are often included or omitted on account of the balance of the overall record rather than on their individual merits.” The band themselves see the television binge model as a parallel: “To suggest the album is under threat because of [streamed] playlists is to suggest that movies will disappear on account of television, they are two completely different things.” Geoff Taylor, the BPI chief executive, backs this view: “The album is where an artist gives the fullest expression to their creative vision at a given moment in time. It’s a musical novel, where multiple themes can intertwine to deliver a cultural experience deeper than a single song, the summit of a performer’s art.” Album ownership, like dogs being for more than Christmas, shouldn’t be about a single 24 hours, be it National Album Day, Record Store Day, or any other such industrial cause. But with some viewing this medium as continuing to hang by a thread, a little indulgence can’t do any harm.

All we need is music, sweet music

In a previous job I had the great privilege to arrive at a crossroads in my personal interests when the legendary Bell Labs, now owned by Nokia, staged a unique event that brought me into contact with Beatie Wolfe. Once named by Wired magazine as “one of 22 people changing the world”, Wolfe is the Los Angeles-based, Anglo-American singer-songwriter who, when she’s not composing beguiling acoustic guitar music, has taken a keen interest in science, technology and innovation, a legacy, she reveals in a new documentary about her, stemming from the discovery that her grandfather worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The “JPL”, for the uninitiated, is NASA’s R&D department, responsible for everything from the Mars Rover to deep space exploration. Clearly the curiosity gene has been passed down to Wolfe. Like pop’s original spaceman, the artist who gives this blog its name, David Bowie, Brian Eno or another hero of mine, Peter Gabriel (whose dilettante nature has taken him off into a multitude of directions, also, perhaps, a result of his inventor father), Wolfe’s work has come out of an innate curiosity with the world. As a child she would look at her parents’ records, not just listening to them but examining how they were packaged and presented. Her debut album 8ight was released as a palm-sized ‘3D theatre’, literally a box that opened up and played audio and visual content associated with the songs. 

As if that wasn’t left-field enough, her second album, Montagu Square was released as a piece of clothing. Conceived at 34 Montagu Square - the former home and studio, at various times, of Jimi Hendrix, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Yoko Ono (and where the notorious Two Virgins cover photograph was shot) - the album continued Wolfe’s interest in making music “tangible”, as well as stretching notions of what a recording artist should be about. The album was literally woven into a jacket made for her by the tailor (not weatherman) Michael Fish, who has dressed the likes of Bowie and Jagger. Using NFC wireless technology, songs could be played back on a mobile phone simply by tapping the jacket. The same NFC technology was used to enable the album to be heard via a pack of cards, with each card containing the album’s tracks individually, as well as multimedia content including the lyrics.

Perhaps this apparent eccentricity is what drew me to Wolfe’s work when, in 2017 she released her third album Raw Space from the quietest room on the planet, the Anechoic Chamber at Bell Labs’ sprawling campus in New Providence, New Jersey. It’s a room where literally all ambient sound is sucked out, rendering visitors at risk of nausea and disorientation. Raw Space was something of a reaction to the streaming age and, again, another attempt to find new forms of tangibility, as well as the narratives that the greatest records have presented in the album age, the story arcs of Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side Of The Moon. Working with Bell Labs and designer Theo Watson, Raw Space was released as a true multimedia stream, combining 360-degree video and artificial reality visuals with the music being played, apparently, off a turntable inside the anechoic room in New Providence, streaming it continuously for seven days in a row. There was more to come when Raw Space was beamed out of the so-called Horn Antenna, the giant listening device in Holmdel - close to New Jersey’s Springsteen country - where Bell Labs scientists first discovered confirming cosmic evidence of The Big Bang. The album became the first piece of music to escape Earth’s atmosphere. It is estimated to have travelled more than 12 trillion miles since.

Earlier this week I was at a Q&A session with the DJ Gary Crowley, during which a member of the audience somewhat showed his age by questioning the interest in music consumption of kids in the streaming age, and the playlist mentality that is supposed to have been adopted in place of listening to albums with a beginning, middle and an end; in my last post I reviewed Sheryl Crow’s new album Threads as, possibly, her last, her interest in recording complete albums diminished by the pic’n’mix streaming culture. To Beatie Wolfe, I suspect, this might smack of Ludditism, which is probably why she is the subject of a brilliant new documentary, Orange Juice For The Ears: From Space Beams To Anti-Streams. Director Ross Harris’s fascinating profile follows Wolfe around her adopted Los Angeles, as she looks for new technologies with which to release music. Poignantly, for me, at least, following the death of my own father from Alzheimer’s Disease in August, Harris accompanies her to a care home in the UK where she performs for dementia patients, part of an initiative she co-founded, The Power of Music And Dementia, to demonstrate how music can have a profoundly positive effect on people living with these cruel conditions. It’s a highly moving segment of the film, but a powerful demonstration, as you see the dementia patients responding to Wolfe’s performance, of just how music is capable of moving anyone. Frankly, it’s why I still care about it.

Listened to without the context of her technology interests, Wolfe’s music is acoustic and simple, matching bittersweet indie lyrics with the kind of folkie guitar you might hear in a West Village coffee shop. That, by the way, isn’t a bad thing. Her solo performance of the utterly beguiling Little Moth, after a preview screening of Orange Juice For The Ears at London’s Barbican Centre on Tuesday, was a pin-drop moment of uncomplicated musical beauty. It was also a reminder of how, there can be so much more to music than just notes, chords and lyrics. If you get a chance to see this remarkable film, you’ll experience for yourself just why.

The end is nigh: Sheryl Crow's Threads

After my post last week about an abruptly different employment status, this latest headline might appear alarmingly nihilistic, but fear not. Following my conscious uncoupling last week I suddenly have time on my hands to catch up on numerous overdue domestic tasks. That includes listening to the small pile of records that has accumulated like traffic cones stacked up by the road, ominously, long before the road gets dug up. Top of the pile, through no particular selection process, is Sheryl Crow’s Threads which, the singer says, will be her last.

She has been touting the prospect of retirement from album making for a while, recently telling Rolling Stone that she’d fallen out of love with the process. “I’ve loved making albums, I’ve loved growing up with albums, [but] I don’t think people listen to albums as a full artistic statement anymore,” she explained. “They cherry pick and make their own playlists or you’ll only hear a song if comes up on a playlist. For me to make a full artistic statement, with a beginning and a middle and an end, and to put the emotion and the money and the time into it only to have it not be heard that way? It seems slightly futile.” Crow is not done yet with the idea of making new music, however, but says she’ll focus on writing and releasing individual songs. Which makes consideration of Threads interesting. “I feel really good about this being my last album,” Crow told Rolling Stone. “I feel like it’s really the summation of my creative life all the way until now. Threads is a beautiful final statement.” Whether it is or whether it is not I’ll come onto in a moment.

But, first, let me take you back a couple of weeks, when I had a job, and was sitting at Munich Airport after yet another corporate country visit. I suddenly realised that the music being piped into the departures area was Coldplay, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what Coldplay song it was (and couldn’t be arsed to fire up SoundHound to find out) because I stopped buying Coldplay albums as they (band and albums) had ceased to be of any interest whatsoever. They’d become over-earnest, the music wallpapery and Chris Martin had basically become a bit of a tit, what with all that latter day hippie-dippieness. The Coldplay song I heard in Munich was pleasant enough, don’t get me wrong, but ordinary. Pleasing, but nothing outlandish. A Ford Mondeo, if you will. William Shatner, even (you’ve seen his face all your life, and even though he’s now, remarkably, in his 80s, it doesn’t seem any different to when he was Captain Kirk in the 1960s). Familiar, like a neighbourhood that never changes.

So what’s that got to do with Sheryl Crow? Well, there have been emerging parallels. 27 years ago, when her debut album Tuesday Night Music Club burst through via the gloriously infectious All I Wanna Do, Crow commenced a run of albums that strolled between LA cool and Stonesesque rock and roll, blues and country, soul, edgier stuff and alt-country folkiness. It was always polished - though thankfully not gloss-polish. It was mature without sounding old, familiar without being derivative. It rightfully propelled her into rock’s executive lounge, recording and touring with the Stones, Eric Clapton (whom she dated, later writing My Favourite Mistake about the experience), and headlining a package tour with John Mayer (I was lucky enough to see their San Diego gig). Such is Crow’s standing that she’s never been short of stellar associations, from the late B.B. King to Bob Dylan. Which brings me to Threads, her eleventh studio record and a 17-track collection of collaborations with a galaxy of luminaries, from Stevie Nicks and Willie Nelson to Clapton and Sting, and from Chuck D to Vince Gill and even Johnny Cash, whom, if memory serves me, died in 2003.

Duet albums are often this way, an excuse to do something with musical mates but which add very little actual value to the principal act’s value proposition. Threads, though, might be different but, perhaps, only in the context of being Crow’s last album. For there has been a creeping sense of diminishing returns with her most recent. That’s not to say that 2013’s Feels Like Home and 2017’s Be Myself weren’t good, they just lacked the vibrancy that made earlier efforts like TNMC, Sheryl Crow and The Globe Sessions zippy and fresh, even with patent, denim-clad classic rock vibes. Things had begun to feel over-familiar, lacking groove. The Coldplay Syndrome.

Picture: Instagram/Sheryl Crow

If Feels Like Home was a reflection of Crow’s relocation with her two adopted sons to Nashville, leaving behind the Californian free spirit that was core to her early work, Threads opens with Prove You Wrong, featuring Nicks and young country star Maren Morris, and as much of a country marker as she could possibly make. Strangely, for an opening song - traditionally a blunderbuss of a track to wake up the listening programme to come - it’s probably the weakest of the 17. Thankfully, the following 16 tracks liven up in varying ways. Tell Me When It’s Over, co-written with and featuring country rocker Chris Stapleton, is one of her best in years, while Lonely Alone with Willie Nelson is a beautiful, gentle confessional. So Live Wire takes a deliciously bluesy route with Bonnie Raitt (who was “instrumental” in Crow picking up a guitar at the age of 17) and Mavis Staples adding a gospel-infused sensibility. The cover of George Harrison’s Beware Of Darkness, featuring Sting and Brandi Carlisle, runs a risk of mawkishness, but is actually quite good (with, thankfully, Sting’s appearance being understated). Others, such as Story of Everything (with Gary Clark Jr. and Chuck D), Still The Good Old Days (with Joe Walsh) and Dylan’s Everything Is Broken (with Jason Isbell) work less well. As an exercise in the application of professional friendships, Threads can’t be faulted. It is as its best when Crow’s natural ability for writing songs with rock-blues roots comes to the fore and you don’t, actually, care all that much who she’s working with on the track.

There are a couple of songs worth highlighting: a cover of the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge track The Worst - a surprising choice at that - is a intriguing duet with Keith Richards. Keef, we all know, is not a natural singer, and yet his rasp provides a wonderful counter to the sweetness of Crow’s own voice. And then there’s Redemption Day, a track Crow included on her eponymous second album in 1996. Originally written after she’d toured US troops in Bosnia, Cash re-recorded the song in 2002, with the intention of making it being the “cornerstone” of his next album, but he died before it could be released. “Cut to now,” Crow explained recently, “and with everything that’s going on in America and in the world that song kept coming to mind so I asked his family if it would be OK if I used his demo vocal.” Cynics might be troubled by such raiding of a dead icon’s past, but the song - already good to begin with - is hauntingly good. We can sometimes sit discomfortably with retreads, reissues and re-recordings, be they of songs, films or television series, but here Crow’s cover of her own song is perfect. “I can’t think of many better compliments as a songwriter [than Cash recording one of your songs],” she said recently. “It was a very humbling experience, to hear him now with this crazy person in office – it was definitely sobering.”

Crow is only 57 - just five years my senior - so it would be horrendous to think of her retiring. She says she’s not, but given that she’s been drawn to, and has drawn to her, some of rock’s grandest statespeople, both on Threads but historically, all because of her traditions of songcraft, it would be a shame to think that the well has run dry. Her argument that the album, as a curated sequence of songs, is a spent force has some validation in this age of streaming services. But at risk of being an old head - face facts, I am - there is still a place for records with a beginning, middle and an end, that tell rich stories through lyrical heft and high quality musicianship. And that should stand out as being recognisable when piped through an airport.