2000 Great Songs #1230: Lay My Love

It's hard to overstate how excited I was about the 1990 collaboration between Brian Eno & John Cale, Wrong Way Up, when it was first announced. By the time I'd discovered Eno's amazing run of mid-70s albums, a few years after the fact, he was recording exclusively instrumental ambient music--which I also loved, but longed for those vocal tracks. And now we were finally getting a new album (or half-album?) of Eno vocals--in a collaboration with the Velvet Underground's John Cale, no less!

As it turned out, the album was pretty good, but I didn't love it as much as I'd hoped. Partially I wasn't a big Cale fan at the time (I've since come to appreciate a lot of his solo work); and partially, the electronica-based songs were a mixed bag. But opener "Lay My Love" was pretty damn near perfect. It's much more a pop song than Eno's early work, a recurring keyboard figure set off against Cale's viola, with some perky electronic percussion; and, ooh, to hear Eno's voice again! It was delightfully infectious, and to this day it brings a huge smile to my face.

Cover by Just Kids:

Yukihiro Takahashi cover:

Poi Dog Pondering live: