175. Song No. 2,600: “Do as I Say Not as I Do,” Ed Harcourt
Lustre, 2010

I can’t believe I haven’t gushed about the guy who, as an opening act I think I and maybe three other people in the audience knew, once played one of my favorite songs for me despite warning how unrehearsed it was (he and his band proceeded to rock the fuck outta “Shanghai,” obviously).

I have loved Ed Harcourt since auspiciously catching “She Fell into My Arms” on the local indie station sometime in high school, and he’s consistently delivered some of the wooliest, most incredible piano-driven music since Tom Waits and that not enough people have heard. Hilarious and brooding, lush and raw, somber and cacophonous, his dozenish albums of varying lengths are monuments to how much ground someone who just exudes music can cover with spectacular results.

Without ever intending to, I stopped listening to Ed Harcourt as much after this third full-length album, Strangers. By the time Lustre came out six years later, I immediately bought it, listened to it and enjoyed it enough, but nothing really jumped out at first. Not like “She Fell into My Arms” did. 

And it took crawling my way through the alphabet to become absolutely smitten with this song from its bouncily staccato’d intro, all throughout its wantonly catchy beat and casually sassy lyrics (“Empty are the pockets of the victims of the baby boom;” “To all the people that I might have offended / You probably needed it”), as it expends its tangled-tongued poetry, exhaled into a diminishing close. It’s fitting for his album emanating the most Lily Allen vibes with its playfulness and unbound cynicism, which Harcourt absolutely has the cheeky charm to pull off.

There’s something validating in how routinely this project offers up new-to-me songs to finally fall in love with. And also how even some of my longest-running favorites and second chances are both such fertile opportunities for hearing a song the way I should have been listening to it all along. And, most of all, how the best of all those worlds leads me back to getting to know an entire album all over again and with the attention it deserves.