As there are so many suitable songs for it I’ve decided to go with a third week of work as my theme. This time, I have two songs which have work in their title, though neither of them is actually about a form of labour. But the other three definitely are about what people do to earn a living, so I’m keeping some kind of balance. And the two work titles are from a couple of my favourites, so I’m yielding to temptation by playing them!

I’m bookending the post with those two. Here’s the first – the video has nothing to do with the song but it’s fun to watch while you listen:

Dirty Work was a track on Steely Dan’s debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill, which was released in November 1972, the month after I started at uni, although we didn’t get it here until January 1973, and it became a huge part of the soundtrack to my three years there. To my ears, the album is a masterpiece, which I’ve loved ever since I first heard it. I have owned it on vinyl, cassette, CD and now it resides in my Apple Music library. Ten tracks of absolute musical perfection. If you haven’t heard it, what have you been doing with your life! It is, quite frankly, the best debut album ever made: it reached #17 in the US and #38 in the UK, and has been certified Platinum in the US and Gold in the UK.

Next up is another of my favourites, who has given us many songs about work. This is, I think, one of his best:

Although that performance dates from 2009 Bruce Springsteen originally included Factory on his fourth album, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, which came out in June 1978 and reached #5 in the US and #14 in the UK, going 3x Platinum in the US for 3m sales and Gold in the UK for 100,000. It had actually been released the previous month as the B-side to Prove It All Night, the first single taken from the album, which reached #33 in the US but didn’t make the UK chart. It’s The Boss in one of his quieter modes, and I still love the song 47 years on.

I’ve played this next one before but as that was almost two years ago I think it’s fair to give it another spin:

Wellerman was first published in New Zealand in the 1970s. It is about the hardships of an ocean life on their whaling ships – not very PC nowadays! – and the title refers to the Weller Brothers, who owned supply ships, and were among the first European settlers in Otago. Nathan Evans is a singer from Airdrie, in Scotland, and during the 2020 lockdowns he built a huge following for himself on Tik Tok by singing a collection of shanties. This song – both his version and others – became a viral hit on social media, and Nathan’s version was released as a single in January 2021. It built on that success, and reached #1 in the UK and six other European countries, also making a couple of top tens – including #4 in the US Digital Singles chart – and even #39 in New Zealand and #62 in Australia. In addition to other sales around the world, it has shifted more than 1.2m copies in the UK, 600k in Germany, 200k in France, and 500k downloads in the US. And this video has more than 417m YouTube views. Not bad for a guy who at the start of the pandemic was a postman! There is just something so warm and soothing about his voice, isn’t there.

My closing two tunes are both making their first appearance here. Having been in the US and UK for the first three, this one takes us Down Under. No, not them – this:

That was Midnight Oil with Blue Sky Mine, the kind of title track from their seventh album Blue Sky Mining, which was released in February 1990. Unsurprisingly it topped the Australian albums chart, and did the same in New Zealand, and it also made #28 in the UK and #20 in the US. The song speaks of the hardship of working in a mine and of the sense of despair that workers have at the hands of the owners, whose only interest is profit. Sound familiar? A theme which has been around as long as music has existed, I think, and it remains relevant to this day. The background is that between 1948 and 1966 mines at Wittenoom, Western Australia produced 161,000 tons of crocidolite fibre, during which time thousands of workers and their families, visitors, tourists, consultants and government officials were exposed to potentially lethal levels of blue asbestos, almost a thousand times higher than occupationally regulated at the time. Many of them would develop fatal diseases due to this, and a string of court cases followed some twenty years later. It is on record as being the single most significant disaster in Australian industrial history. And all that is encapsulated in a four minute song, written by a guy who went on to become a politician.

After that tale of woe I feel it incumbent on me to end on a note of optimism, and here it is:

That was Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers with It’ll All Work Out, which was a track on their seventh album, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), released in April 1987. It was the band’s poorest performing record, only reaching #20 in the US and #59 in the UK, but I always felt it was undervalued. This is a song recalling a former love, one who he didn’t treat well and lost to another, but with the optimistic conclusion that things will work out for the best in the end. It is a message I always hold dear, as it often proves correct, and it feels like a good place to leave you with this week’s selections.

As always, I hope you enjoyed the tunes, and I’ll see you again soon. Take care 😊