261. Song No. 3,904: “God Protect Your Soul,” Ed Harcourt
Here Be Monsters, 2001

An awful lot of delightful surprises have popped up over the course of this project, but I think one of the best is what tracks have emerged as unexpectedly familiar friends in an effort centered around giving so much unheard and under-appreciated music its time to shine.

Like each preceding letter, every one of Ed Harcourt’s G songs has been a little oasis of well-loved familiarity. This song is that quartet’s king, rocking me back to the auspicious radio-surfing discovery in high school that launched my decades-long fondness for this dude and his music (and, more recently, his often giddily surreal Instagram account), and it’s a shame that I have not given enough love to the guy who, over the course of the same opening set, both played a song at my request despite warning that the band hadn’t rehearsed it in a while and ripped their setlist right off the stage floor to hand directly to me.

Unfortunately for the moody, grooving “God Protect Your Soul,” it shares an album with the piano-driven “She Fell into My Arms,” the song that introduced me to both Here Be Monsters and Ed Harcourt, and “Shanghai,” the aforementioned live request that had quickly emerged as my second-most-obsessively repeated song on an album that remains one of my favorites more than 20 years after our introduction.

It also has the misfortune to be the song right before “She Fell into My Arms,” meaning that I often impatiently waited for it to wrap up so I could dive right into the star of the show. And in doing so, I completely glossed over this gently ominous anthem for those who are eternally guarded but forever pondering “But I want to smile with everybody / Would you say that is possessive of me?”