The Lovers' Album of the Week

Yo La Tengo Prisoners of Love: A Smattering of Scintillating Senescent Songs 1985 - 2003 along with A Shattering of Outtakes and Rarities

During the Summer of `96, I fell madly in love with Elvis Costello's rendition of the ol' Cole Porter song "Love for Sale." I had heard it while driving a friend's car who happened to have the Costello album Trust in his tape deck. For months I begged my friend to make me a mix tape with that song and when he finally got around to it he had added a few more artists that he thought I should check out including Nick Drake and NRBQ. But the mix tape primarily consisted of selections from Yo La Tengo's 1990 release Fakebook, an album of cleverly chosen covers (the Kinks, Cat Stevens, Daniel Johnston) and a handful of beautiful originals ("Can't Forget" and "The Summer"). When I eventually purchased the real album, it struck me funny that my friend had included all but three songs from the original. It was if he was so in love with that album that he had had a hard time disregarding anything from it. So I could only imagine the daunting task of putting together Yo La Tengo's latest release, Prisoners of Love, a double disc retrospective covering an 18 year (!) career. Instead of following chronological order, Prisoners jumps back and forth through the years to create an album that would deem enjoyable to both the novice and the fanatic. Selections include tracks from the earliest years ("The River of Water" from the first 7 inch) to the latest releases ("Season of the Shark," "Little Eyes") as well as their most achingly beautiful ("You Can Have It All," Our Way To Fall," "Tears Are In Your Eyes") and most challenging rockers ("From a Motel 6," "Tom Courtenay," "Sugarcube"). Of course, it is impossible to include everything (What, no “Big Sky”?) but it's hard to dismiss any of the carefully chosen picks. The greatest thrill of Prisoners of Love, though, is an optional third disc which gives us 16 tracks of outtakes and rarities including 5 tunes that had previously been unreleased. One listen to "Pencil Test," an outtake from 1997's I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, will have you scratchin' your head with wonder at how a song so lovingly could be left off any album. But when you have such a great catalog of material like Yo La Tengo, you make things hard for folks like my friend who made that mix tape so many years ago. Last week for the first time on the Music Lovers, I played four songs in a row from one artist. How fitting that it was the darlings of indie rock, Yo La Tengo.