The most glaring example is the unnaturally high position (42) of the title track from this album. It's just a song, a long folk song you've never heard by someone you've probably never heard of. It's not the 42nd most important, defining moment in the history of song.
I suppose.
It's damn good though. I've written before about James Yorkston and what makes him such a distinguished, mesmeric performer, despite a total lack of glamour and a limited vocal range. 'When the Haar Rolls In', as a song, is his magnum opus, a beautiful journey through memory, lost love, music and melancholy, which I feel is almost unrivalled in song, in not just capturing a part of a story or describing a feeling or expressing a sentiment, but in being the whole story, everything you feel you need to know about the writer and his life and his feelings and his situation.
There are different types of great lyrics - a great, bouncing, rhythmical lyric, rich in musicality and internal rhyme, like you may find in something like 'Anything Goes' or 'To Ramona' or day I say it, the raps of Eminem, and then there's someone like Yorkston, who usually writes as if it he doesn't entirely realise the words will be set to music and yet, when they are, they fall utterly seamlessly into place. Hmm, that doesn't quite capture it, implies there's something amateurish. Far from it. The point is it sounds natural, like real things a real person would say, except beautiful and poetic.
He deals in the folk medium though is not entirely afraid of modern sounds or turning the volume up. Oddly his most famous song is a piece of spoken word electronica called 'Woozy with Cider'.
As a man, I imagine he's a little complex - his lyrics are full of faux-humility alongside general contempt for modernity and urbanity. I don't know, something about him makes me think he's tricky!
This is one of two of his five full studio albums of original material which I would place in the highest bracket, along with his debut 'Moving Up Country'. The album feels as a whole like a meditation on love past - several of these songs seem to be mainstays of his live shows, like 'Tortoise Regrets Hare' (as good as its title), 'Temptation' and 'Queen of Spain'.
There's a fabulously meaty cover of 'Midnight Feast' by the Watersons, but it's the epic title track that sticks with you, with as many memorable phrases as 'Thunder Road' and a final surrender to the healing powers of music.
Somehow, though James Yorkston is aligned closely with modern folk music, and certainly knows his folk music in and out, he's almost too much of an individual voice with a modern confessional sensibility to be constrained by that.
I've included songs of his on a Fence compilation way in the past, but rather than updating that, this will be a purely James Yorkston list.
Sweet Jesus
Surf Song
Woozy with Cider
St Patrick
B's Jig
Shipwreckers
Tortoise Regrets Hare
Border Song
I Spy Dogs
A Short Blues
Banjo #1
Moving Up Country, Roaring the Gospel
Banjo #2
The Lang Toun
Year of the Leopard
When the Haar Rolls In
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