Song 261: This week on the playlist, we've got Peace Love and Understanding by Elvis Costello, written by Nick Lowe. It might seem a bit soon for Costello to show up again, since I posted Girls Talk not so long ago, but that was Linda Ronstadt covering his song, whereas here he's covering a Nick Lowe composition, so I believe that spreads the spotlight around a bit. As you may notice, this week's track continues the peace theme from last week in recognition of the historic agreement reached with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the resulting clash swirling around D.C. as the pro-war gang struggles to derail that deal. In the fall of 1977, I saw EC on his first U.S. tour, and I enjoyed his show, although I liked the opening act (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) a bit more. I thought this new late-1970s Elvis sounded pretty good, though, and when he came along with this song a year or two later, I felt he had exceeded my expectations. Certainly Dylan, Pete Seeger and a few others had written some good songs about war and peace, but I longed for one that really rocked out, and that also took on the issue with some genuine feeling while delving into the complexity of human conflict instead of painting a simplistic, two-toned good vs. evil picture of the matter, so then EC suddenly had this new track that accomplished all of that, in a way that made it sound easy. As a songwriter myself, I had wanted to meet that challenge, and at the time, it certainly did not come easily to me. I especially like the way this lyric asks why so many people would laugh at the very suggestion of wanting to have peace, when, as H. G. Wells warned us, "If we don't end war, war will end us." Now, more than ever, in this era of atomic weapons, we need to take peace, love and understanding seriously, and to get there while we still can, before we set ourselves on a path to our own destruction.
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