Bright Eyes, Beck on List

Bright Eyes' Lifted or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground is among the "Long List" finalists for the 2003 Shortlist Music Prize. The Shortlist Prize was initiated three years ago to honor albums of artistic merit that registered below 500,000.

The Long List includes albums picked by the Shortlist panel, which includes musicians Dave Matthews, Mos Def and Tom Waits, and filmmakers Cameron Crowe and Spike Jonze. Among other albums picked for the Long List are Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, Beck's Sea Change and other rock records like Grandaddy's Sumday, the Mars Volta's De-Loused in the Comatorium, Wire's Send, Spoon's Kill the Moonlight and Soundtrack of Our Lives' Behind the Music. Common's Electric Circus, Dead Prez's Turn Off the Radio and David Banner's Mississippi (The Album) are among the hip-hop selections. Soul and blues are represented by Solomon Burke's Don't Give Up on Me and the Black Keys' Thickfreakness. Carrie Rodriguez and Chip Taylor's Let's Leave This Town and Gillian Welch's Soul Journey represent for folk/country.

The panel will whittle the list down to ten albums by the first week of September. The winning album will then be announced on October 16th at the Shortlist Music Prize award show at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles.

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Song Stories

“Let My Love Open the Door”

Pete Townshend | 1980

A peppy, hopeful love song, "Let My Love Open the Door" became a U. S. Top Ten hit for Pete Townshend in 1980, anchored by the kind of repeating synthesizer figures that he'd used in some of the Who's recordings in the previous decade. Although Townshend brushed the song off as "just a ditty" in Rolling Stone shortly after its release, in 1996 he revealed it was about love of the holiest sort. "It's supposed to be about the power of God's love," he remarked. "That when you're in difficulty, whether it's major or minor, God's love is always there for you."

More Song Stories entries »

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