Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Certain Songs #949: Lloyd Cole & The Commotions – “Lost Weekend” | Medialoper

Album: Easy Pieces
Year: 1985

The other great single from Easy Pieces, “Lost Weekend” was a bouncy, will o’the wisp of a song that rides a jaunty Neil Clark guitar part and over compensating lead vocals from Lloyd Cole to try and mask what was a pretty dark set of lyrics.

That’s actually one of my favorite tricks of course — the song that tries to hide its true intentions behind a mask of cheerfulness. But of course, the second you pay attention to the words, it’s a completely different story.

It took a lost weekend in a hotel in Amsterdam
Double pneumonia in a single room
And the sickest joke was the price of the medicine
Are you laughing at me now, may I please laugh along with you?

And for neither the first nor the last time, you can make the assumption that the “medicine” to which he refers probably had nothing to do with actually curing him. And as he points out in the chorus, he’s in a pretty bad state.

You see, I
I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it
Drop me and I’ll fall to pieces so easily

And it’s amplified on the bridge, which comes out of nowhere — one of my friends pointed out that it was so abrupt that there was no way it should have worked — jarring the listener out of the bouncy music for a few bars while Lloyd bares his soul about his current predicament.

Yeah, easy, there’s nobody else to blame
I hang my head in a crying shame (shame)
There’s nobody else to blame
Nobody else except my sweet self, oh

That leads directly into a short piano solo by Blair Cowan — almost buried underneath Clarks guitar and the usual extraneous strings — that leads into the final verses where Lloyd repeats his predicament like he’s figured that there’s really no escape. But of course, on the next record, things were about to get weirder.

“Lost Weekend”

“Lost Weekend” performed live in 1986

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