1.[radio edit] (3:59) 2.[acoustic version] (3:34) 3.A Better Way (2:46)
Once upon a time, Badly Drawn Boy was considered to be a lo-fi. Early vinyl-only EPs that seemed to have been (an occasionally were) recorded on a Walkman certainly lived up to that reputation. The hugely successful The Hour of Bewilderbeast (it's not called "The Hour of the Bewilderbeast") made him an unlikely mainstream star and got him the job of writing the soundtrack to the cinema adaptation of About a Boy; if it's hard to imagine an unshaven man from Bolton with a funny woolen hat fitting into Hollywood, he certainly made a fair effort, decamping to the USA and working with American producer Tom Rothrock.
Silent Sigh was the first widely available single from the soundtrack album, and became his first Top 20 hit. In isolation, it slightly betrays its cinematic origins with its lack of a conventional structure - presumably he started out by writing a melody around the film - but it was a catchy and deserved hit. The radio edit, in case you're wondering, is 45 seconds shorter than the full album track, driven by Sasha Krivtsov's bassline.
The acoustic version is not a completely solo performance but is detectably more stripped-down.
A Better Way was evidently recorded at the same sessions but does not appear in the film. It's a slightly rockier and rougher track, though not an especially outstanding one.
By the end of 2002, Badly Drawn Boy had released another album with Rothrock, the patchy Have You Fed the Fish? and broken into the singles Top 10 with 'You Were Right'. But his first album of the year proved to be the better one.
ONLINE:
His official site is rather cute.
The record labels Twisted Nerve and XL.
Back to the random single project