KT Tunstall "Feel It All"

We've played KT Tunstall's records from the beginning.  It was hard to deny a hit like "Black Horse And The Cherry Tree."  Hard to deny her talent.

But as she has progressed through her first three albums I was becoming less and less excited about her.

Increasingly, the records were relying on production for their strength.  The singles were slicker and decidedly more commercial, but felt less and less appropriate for the general sound of our station.  Tunes like "Hold On" and  particularly "Fade Like A Shadow" were surprisingly hard to place within an hour, too often sounding like they belonged on some Hot AC Hits station, not ours.

I got deeply disappointed, and at the same time increasingly hopeful, the day I came across some pretty amazing Youtube videos.

There are a ton of live-concert-setting videos of Tunstall performing as she must have when she was an unknown, busking on the streets.  It's her and her guitar and sometimes a sample/tape loop track.

Stripped of all the production, her natural charisma and deep well of talent rises straight to the front.

"Can she please make an album that strips away the bullshit?"

It sounds like she has.

We've been sent only a couple of tracks from "Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon," but this record seems to be a clear departure.  Hell, it practically sounds like a different artist.

Even the folks promoting the record to me, are expressing a bit of surprise at the leap forward in maturity Tunstall has made with her songwriting and presentation.  None of the four tracks find her presence overwhelmed by their setting, and on the whole, it seems like she's created something that puts the onus squarely on herself.

Which, in her case, is a very good thing.


Hear "Feel It All" on Youtube.


Hear "Fade Like A Shadow" on Youtube.


Hear an acoustic version of the song on Youtube.

Dire Straits "Money For Nothing"

We're all familiar with The Grandfather Clause Of Language, right?

A regular, legal, Grandfather Clause, you know, allows the continued practice of a recently banned act, if the practitioner has been engaging in said practice for a really long time.

The Grandfather Clause Of Language basically means that you are willing to give an elderly person a pass on the offensive (or racist or politically incorrect) things they say, if said remark was not considered offensive in "their day," even if it is inappropriate now.

And there is an equivalent phenomenon in music.

Certain songs we play, going back 20, 30, 40 years, may contain a word that was allowed to be broadcast when it first came out. If a song featuring that same word came out today, the word would most certainly be censored.

How else to explain that no station that I've ever heard, ever censors the word "Nigger" in Elvis Costello's "Oliver's Army"? Cee-Lo Green certainly couldn't use that word (or several others) in his Radio Edit of "Fuck You."

And strangely, most Classic Rock stations have always kept the "do goody-good Bullshit" line intact, in Pink Floyd's "Money." But any current radio song with the same lyric, would have to arrive at the station, "Bullshit"-free.

At Christmastime, you never hear the word "faggot" edited out of The Pogues song "Fairytale Of New York." Yet, when KT Tunstall and Ed Harcourt covered it recently, they were requested to alter that line.

Weirdly, if a song has gotten by the censors all these years, it seems to get left alone.

Until now.

What to make of The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council's decision to ban play of "Money For Nothing" unless the word "faggot" is edited out . . . 25 years after the song came out?

Bizarre, eh?