Okay, so now I'm actually playing the album. Let's see, as Brucey says, how wrong I am...
1. Great imposter: Well, no big horns start the song off. How disappointing.
In fact, it's a bouncy uptempo acoustic guitar number. So far. No
mardi gras here pal! No brass band, although I think I do hear a banjo. Maybe. Well it's uptempo, just not as much as I had thought, and the whole makeup of the song is not quite what I had envisioned.
2. Hey broken: I notice just now that this is less than two minutes long, so hold out hopes of my gentle acoustic ballad being right on the money ... Ah. But it starts off with handclap percussion and a sort of folky uptempo feel with some nice backing vocals and really no instrument other than drums I can hear at the moment. Not a ballad then. Not an acoustic one, though there is a piano breaking in so that's something I guess.
3. Fire for you: Not as hard-hitting as I thought, sort of a shuffle with a kind of twenties feel, piano mostly, but it is a love song and that's what fire for you means, so I at least got that much right. Little touch of ELO about it if I'm honest.
4. Dirt and stardust: Surely this is the ballad? Well yes, it starts on slow acoustic guitar, so that's good. Mind you, I said it would be mid-paced and it certainly is not. Bad guess on my part. Oh well. Got the subject right though:
"I am made of all the same stuff/ That makes the seasons what they are/ I am made of dirt and stardust/ My daddy's dreams, my mother's heart". Woo-hoo! Pedal steel rather than mandolin, but not too bad a guess. First one I've come close to getting reasonably right. Yay for me! Sort of.
5. Flutter: Never mentioned what I expected to be the main instrument here, so no points for that, but given that I said it would be acoustic I probably meant piano or guitar. Too late now though. I hear guitar now but mostly flute, and although it started as a possible ballad, nah it ain't. Tempo picking up now on the back of the guitar, nice electric piano (Fender Rhodes?) and sort of marching drums. Flutter seems to refer to the flutter of wings, so minus several zillion points for that one. Ooh wait: she just said
"Flutter like a heartbeat"! Yes! But generally I got this wrong. Again.
6. Iron bull: Why do I feel I totally, absolutely got this bang on the head wrong? Maybe because I was so stupid as to equate the iron horse with an iron bull and think the song would be about trains? It's an uptempo song anyway, so there's that; quite rock, driven mostly on guitar though I do hear organ, which I mentioned. Talking about riding on an iron bull, but I don't think it's anything to do with the railroad... Hey, there's the guitar solo I was talking about! Not scorching, but, you know, I'll take it!
7. Turn yourself around: And this one I got so wrong! Not an uptempo, affirmative song at all, but a slow, very slow, acoustic ballad on guitar with some nice vocal harmonies. I was struggling at the time with whether this was how it might sound, but decided to go the other way. What? You don't believe me? I swear! Anyway it don't matter cos I made a total hash of this. Wrong on just about every front. Okay, it gets punchier as it goes on, but that's no salvation for me.
8. Miss Mary Mack: I really had no idea what this song would be like. Some of my guesses here have been at least based on some sort of an idea; this one I had no clue. And so it proves. Nothing of bluegrass or any other sort of grass in this. Sort of mid-paced semi-ballad with piano and guitar.
Grace: Well in some ways yeah I was right: it is to do with gospel, in fact it seems to be a version of "Amazing grace", which I did not catch at all. Okay, that was just the opening. But then it's uptempo with fast acoustic guitar and seems to be about welfare fraud? Pulling in the phrase amazing grace but referring it to a girl called Grace, so struck pretty much out on this one.
Darlene: And this one. Where are all the hillbilly songs?
A soft, almost lullaby-like ballad with guitar and piano.
11. Flying on helium: And finally, not so much atmospheric or ambient, just a slow acoustic guitar number. Nice vocal harmonies and some sweet pedal steel. Nothing much like what I had expected really. Story of this album, and, probably, this journal.
So that's the guesses and the reality. Next I'll be scoring this album, after explaining my rating system (yeah, there's one: this is me, after all!) and see what I come up with for this first effort.