Dave Edmunds – "Girls Talk" (1979)

Thought I heard you mention my name

Can't you talk any louder?

As unbelievable as it may seem, today marks the tenth anniversary of everyone’s favorite little pop music blog . . . the one, the only 2 or 3 lines (and so much more).

Many people overlook the and so much more part of my blog’s name.  Perhaps that’s because I usually refer to the blog simply as 2 or 3 lines.  Or perhaps it’s because I put the and so much more in parentheses, and parenthetical expressions are considered to be “nonessential” by the grammar powers-that-be.  

Don’t sleep on and so much more.  One could argue that the and so much more stuff is not only essential to the blog, but is even essentialer than the 2 or 3 lines part.

It’s certainly something to think about, n’est-ce pas?

Oui, oui, oui!  But not right now.

Because right now it’s time for 2 or 3 lines to give you a heapin’ helpin’ of and so much more in the form of an interview with . . . none other than 2 or 3 lines himself!

(In parentheses, yes – but nonessential?  NO!)

That’s right!  2 or 3 lines is going to interview 2 or 3 lines!  It’s groundbreaking . . . it’s unprecedented . . . it’s meta to the meta power!

But most of all . . . it’s sooooo 2 or 3 lines (and so much more)!

Without further ado . . .

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2 or 3 lines:  Let’s begin at the beginning.  Tell me about the genesis of 2 or 3 lines.

2 or 3 lines:  That story really begins in 1980 – a couple of years after I graduated from law school and moved to Washington, DC.  I discovered a radio show called “Mystic Eyes” on the old WHFS and started recording it on cassette tapes.  The DJ played records that I never heard anywhere else, including one that became a particular favorite of mine – I thought it was maybe the best rock song ever, but I didn’t know the name of the song or the group that recorded it.  

Q: Didn’t the DJ announce the titles of the songs he played?

A: He did, but I would usually hit “pause” on my cassette deck when the music ended and the DJ started talking – trying to conserve tape, I suppose.

Q: So how did you manage to identify the mystery song? 

A:  About 25 years after I first heard it, I plugged a very distinctive phrase from its lyrics into a search engine (probably Alta Vista, not Google – this was a long time ago) and got exactly one hit.  That hit took me to the website of a Los Angeles band called The Last, where I found everything I wanted to know about "She Don't Know Why I'm Here.”  (You can click here to go to that website.)

Q: And that inspired you to create 2 or 3 lines?

A:  I wanted to tell the story of how I finally figured out what the song was, but mostly I wanted to share the song – which is relatively obscure – with a wider audience.  That gave me the idea of doing a blog about other great records that had somehow fallen through the cracks.

Q: On the same day you posted about "She Don't Know Why I'm Here,” you wrote sort of a FAQ for 2 or 3 lines titled “What? Who? Why?”  It states that “[w]ho I am and how I became what I am today is very relevant to the songs I've chosen to feature on this blog, but . . . [t]his blog is more about the music than it is about me.”

A:  I really should revise that.  A lot of 2 or 3 lines posts are more about me than they are about the featured songs.

Q:  A lot of your posts are quite autobiographical.

A:  “Narcissistic” is another word that has been used to describe them.

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Q:  You’ve said that the first year of 2 or 3 lines was probably its best year.  In 2016, you wrote that your blog “started to go downhill in 2013, I think.  Since then there have been flashes of brilliance, but they’re getting to be few and far between.”  Do you still feel that way?

A:  Absolutely.  I’ve started cleaning up my old posts – by “clean up,” I mean I fix broken links, change the font so the appearance of the old post is consistent with the appearance of newer ones, and so on – and I am often almost moved to tears by how good the old posts are compared to most of my recent ones.

Life was good during
the Golden Age of Greece

Q:  The ancient Greeks had a Golden Age, a Silver Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age.  What age would you say 2 or 3 lines is currently in?

A:  Maybe the Crap Age?

Q:  What makes the older posts better?

A:  The best posts from the “Golden Age” of 2 or 3 lines always began with a great song – usually (although not always) a song that wasn’t very well-known.  Some of those posts focused almost entirely on the song – I might have analyzed the song’s lyrics or musical structure at length, or discussed the life of the songwriter or performer who recorded it.  But the more interesting posts addressed topics that had only a tangential relationship to the song.  The song was the starting point, but where the post went from there was unpredictable – the journey was more important than the destination.

Q:  What changed?

A:  After a few years, I was having a harder time coming up with interesting content.  A lot of my best posts have autobiographical elements, but my life isn’t all that interesting – I had only a limited supply of good stories to tell about myself.  So it became something of a struggle to come up with interesting content – I would have to pull my topic from a newspaper or magazine, then find a song that had a connection to that topic.  Half the time, the song was an afterthought – sometimes I didn’t even like the song, but featured it simply because it fit the content of the post.

Q: Is part of the problem that you committed to writing three posts a week?

A:  Absolutely.  At the beginning, I would only do a post when the spirit moved me, which wasn’t very often.  I produced only 21 posts in the first six months after I started 2 or 3 lines – that’s less than one post per week.  I more than tripled my output over the next six months, and settled into a three-posts-a-week schedule after that.  Plus I started posting daily in February, which meant I was cranking out about 170 posts a year.

Q:  Here’s how you answered an interviewer who asked you a few years ago what the biggest problem with 2 or 3 lines was: “The fact that I insist on doing three posts a week even when I don’t have anything to say.  In the last couple of years, I’ve been too busy and too distracted to write three good posts a week.  So I’ve written three crappy posts a week.”  Given that, why did it you insist on maintaining the three-posts-a-week schedule for so long?

A:  I’m stubborn.  I’m also lazy, but my decision to go from three posts a week to two posts a week wasn’t really motivated by laziness.  I’m spending as much time on 2 or 3 lines as ever, but I’m hoping that devoting the same amount of time to fewer posts will mean those posts will be better.  

Q:   You retired from your law firm two years ago, so I assume it’s easier to find time for  2 or 3 lines?  

A:  You would think so, but so far it hasn’t worked out that way.  Somehow, it’s become harder for me to find the time to write.

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Q:  You say that the decision to cut back from three to two posts weekly wasn’t the result of laziness.  But I have to say that you’ve done some things recently that seem to indicate that laziness may be at work here.  For example, your June and July posts were mostly recycled posts that you had previously published.

A: My June and July posts featured the new class of inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME and the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.  It should come as no surprise that I had previously written about most of those songs – after all, they’re some of the greatest rock songs of all time.  I didn’t hold anything back when I wrote those original posts – if I had written new posts about the same songs, they would have been redundant at best and inferior at worst.  Plus I went to Europe in June and to Cape Cod in July.  Maybe you work year round and don’t take vacations or holidays, but I do.  I could have just shut 2 or 3 lines down during my vacations, but instead I prepared the hall of fame posts in advance of my departure so my loyal readers wouldn’t have to go weeks without 2 or 3 lines.

Q: What about last month, when 2 or 3 lines consisted of recycled posts from 2009-2010?

A: In case you’ve forgotten, this is the TENTH ANNIVERSARY of 2 or 3 lines, which is kind of a big deal.  I decided to mark the occasion by picking out a few of the very best posts from the blog’s first year of existence and republishing them.  What you refer to as “recycled” posts represent the crème de la crème of the first year of 2 or 3 lines, and those readers who became aware of 2 or 3 lines only recently deserve the chance to read them.  Plus this past October was a very busy month for me – I’ve been working on a lot of very special surprises for my readers, which we can talk about later in this interview.  

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2 or 3 lines:  I’m sure you thought long and hard before choosing the song you would feature on the tenth anniversary of 2 or 3 lines.  Why “Girls Talk”?

2 or 3 lines:  It’s a great song.  In fact, it may be my favorite song not to have been featured on 2 or 3 lines to date – I’m surprised that I haven’t written about it already.

Q:  Elvis Costello, who wrote “Girls Talk,” is a favorite of yours.  But you’ve chosen to feature the Dave Edmunds cover of the song, which was released in 1979 on his Repeat When Necessary album:

A.  The story goes that Costello handed Edmunds a cassette tape with a rough demo of “Girls Talk” on it one day and said, “Here’s a song for you.”  Edmunds wasn’t crazy about the song.  But he liked the opening line – “There are some things you can’t cover up with lipstick and powder” – so he decided to spend some time coming up with a completely different arrangement.  

Q:  Costello recorded the song a year later, and his version is quite different.

A:  I’ll take the Edmunds “Girls Talk” any day of the week.  Costello deserves credit for writing the very clever lyrics, but Edmunds’ arrangement is just as important.

Q:  What makes the arrangement so noteworthy?

A:  For one thing, listen to the introduction.  You expect the opening two-measure guitar riff to be repeated four times, but Edmunds jumps in and starts singing after only three repetitions of that riff – plus the song changes keys when he starts singing.  You’re immediately thrown a little off balance, but the song has already found a solid groove, so it doesn’t lose you.  When the guitar solo begins, there’s another key change just to keep things interesting.  The arrangement is unconventional, but not so much that it’s annoying. 

[NOTE: Here endeth part one of the 2 or 3 lines interview of 2 or 3 lines.  Click here to go to part two of the interview.]

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Click here to read what Dave Edmunds told Carl Wiser of Songfacts about “Girls Talk.”

Click here to listen to the Elvis Costello version of “Girls Talk.”

Click here to listen to the Dave Edmunds recording, which was a top five single in the UK.  (I told you it was better than the Costello version.)

Click here to buy the Edmunds version of “Girls Talk” from Amazon.