Monday, March 02, 2009

Album of the Day #141: AERIAL BALLET - Harry Nilsson

Title: Ariel Ballet
Artist: Harry Nilsson
Label: RCA
Year: 1968
Songs: Daddy’s Song/Good Old Desk/Don’t Leave Me/Mr. Richard’s Favorite Song/Little Cowboy/Together/Everybody’s Talkin’ [Fred Neil]/I Said Goodbye To Me/Little Cowboy/Mr. Tinker/One/The Wailing Of The Willow/Bath
Written by: Harry Nilsson, except where noted
Produced by:
Rick Jarrard
Thoughts: A lot of great records came out in 1968 and this is certainly one of them. Aerial Ballet feels a lot like its’ predecessor, except there is only one cover, that being the immortal “Everybody’s Talkin’”. The originals are a lot stronger, though with powerful tracks like “One”, “I Said Goodbye To Me” and “Together”. Nilsson’s perfect humor runs throughout, with the wonderful “Good Old Desk” and the hilarious closer, “Bath”. His personal nursery rhyme “Little Cowboy” shows up twice as sort of a linking track, making the whole album feel as if it is a grand scheme to show how Nilsson grew up.
“One” also has to be one of my favorite songs of all time. You just feel a tingling up your spine every time you hear it. It is so amazing and scary almost. The message of it seems to be that no matter what you do, it never works. “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever know./Two can be as bad as one,/Because it’s the loneliest number since the number one.” I mean, that’s just proves that even if you are successful in getting together with someone, you are still alone, just with someone else.
Simply put, this is one of those albums that, like his first one, somehow go unheard by the vast majority of the population. Aerial Ballet is just twenty-eight minutes long, but that’s all it takes for Harry to pull at your heart-strings and make you sit back and say “wow”.

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