The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale (1999)
I’m lucky to have lived a charmed life where there’s been incredibly few times when this song would have keenly resonated. But it’s good to know that There Is Lonely and Solo are there to wallow in should that dark hour arrive. In fact, in order to purge all residual grief from this shipwreck of a year I may play them on December 31st, along with Bowie’s Blackstar and Cohen’s You Want it Darker and dissolve into the floor, waking up reassembled in a better year. A year of compassion. A year where you turn on the telly and every other story ISN’T telling you somebody died. Written for the same film soundtrack as The Rest of my Life and My Little Pill, There Is Lonely suffers from a similar affliction of sounding like a sketch of a song, but hey, a fragment of a Prince song trumps anything found in your average discography and wanting it to be longer is barely a criticism. Featuring his lowest register and sandwiched between two more songs about loneliness, it forms the dark, melancholy heart of his The Vault comp. A Spanish-guitar laden black dog. It’s not only the lights that go down after track five.