Fumbler's Café

I have been listening to this song a lot from the "Under a Blackened Sky" bootleg (available from Ellen) and on it this song is called "Fall From Grace". She sings those words in place of "full of grace" in the song, and otherwise it sounds the same, except for a single line towards the end that sounds like "together we crumble and fall".

The next-to-last verse on the album version reads as follows:

If all of the strength and all of the courage
Come and lift me from this place
I know I could love you much better than this
Full of grace

On this recording (she said in the intro she was trying out a new song) it sounds like:

If all of the strength and all of the courage
Come and lift me from this place
together we crumble and stumble and fall
fall from grace

The 2 other places where she sings "full of grace" are "fall from grace", also. The line "I know I could love you much better than this" is in the last verse in both versions, so this line is a subtraction from the earlier version in the album version.

I was wondering if anybody knows why she changed the song in this way prior to Surfacing. The song's emotional impact is equal with either version, but the story must be different. Perhaps it was intended to be a lament about lost love, and she thought it was better as a perhaps forlorn hope for love found again.

Either way, I find it a compelling and moving song, and I particularly love it since it was a piano solo in that show.

This concert was in Denver in 1995. As usual, every song is fabulous.

Ed

Yes, I have this version too. I have it in my head that I read somewhere that it was a change instigated by the record company. Don't quote me on that, but I think that's correct.
Whichever version you listen to it's still good.

If you listen to the original version of Possession (on a TV show, can't remember who's thought), there are changes there compared to what you hear in FTE, but mainly in the structure of the song and not the lyrics.
I'll have to pull Possession out and listen to it now.

Q

Quincy wrote:Yes, I have this version too. I have it in my head that I read somewhere that it was a change instigated by the record company. Don't quote me on that, but I think that's correct.
Whichever version you listen to it's still good.

If you listen to the original version of Possession (on a TV show, can't remember who's thought), there are changes there compared to what you hear in FTE, but mainly in the structure of the song and not the lyrics.
I'll have to pull Possession out and listen to it now.

Q

Quincy,

I read in the YouTube videos comments that Earthly Heavens put out with her "rare" songs something about a lot of arguments with Nettwork (?) or Arista about her songs, and that she was really frustrated by it. But this show was after FTE debuted, so perhaps that's what happened, but she still liked to sing the earlier version. I thought maybe she changed her perspective on the song from "past" to "present", as someone else has said about it. It's indicative of her ability to craft lyrics that she can make it work so well with these subtle, but significant changes. To keep the sense of the song so perfectly is wonderful. So it has the curious effect of making me think of the "other" lyrics now whichever version I'm listening to. She couldn't have done it better if she had been trying to.

Ed

It's really cool that you can still edit posts from weeks ago, even after others have replied. I saw I had some errors in the "alternate" lyrics in the first post. I suppose one could get a logic loop going to beat hell, if one wanted to! Ha