Dave Edmunds

Certain Songs #273: Dave Edmunds – “One More Night”

August 6, 2015 by Jim Connelly

Album: D.E. #7
Year: 1982

After the relative slightness of … Twangin’, D.E. 7th was a definite comeback for Dave Edmunds. Kicking off with a one-two punch of a unreleased Springsteen song and a heavy-rocking NRBQ song, D.E. 7th suggested there could be a career for Edmunds in a post-Rockpile world.

Of course, Rockpile was missed, so while D.E. 7th never quite rose to the heights of Repeat When Necessary and Tracks on Wax 4, it does have one of my all-time favorite ballads, the exquisite “One More Night”

Certain Songs #272: Dave Edmunds – “Girls Talk”

August 5, 2015 by Jim Connelly

Album: Repeat When Necessary
Year: 1979

The Dave Edmunds cover of Elvis Costello’s “Girls Talk” is an object lesson of “the singer not the song.” I mean, Elvis Costello’s version is a nice-enough outtake from the Get Happy!!! sessions, but the Dave Edmunds version is one of the great singles of the 1970s.

Why? Rockpile, that magical confluence of Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, Billy Bremner and Terry Williams.

Certain Songs #271: Dave Edmunds – “What Did I Do Last Night?”

August 4, 2015 by Jim Connelly

Album: Get It
Year: 1977

While he kinda seems forgotten these days, Dave Edmunds was really pretty great for awhile in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when — not coincidentally — he worked with Nick Lowe and Rockpile.

But what made Dave Edmunds really special was that he was one of the few artists in the rock era who didn’t write his own material. He just wasn’t a songwriter. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but its hard to name another artist who came out of post-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll and sustained a career without writing their own material.