Nick Lowe - 'The Beast In Me' (Official Audio)

Listen to "The Beast In Me" from the compilation Quiet Please: The New Best of Nick Lowe, available from Yep Roc Records.

#NickLowe #TheBeastInMe #YepRocRecords

[stilesbentley]

This is an incredible song. Always makes me think of my father. He got the purple heart when he was on a destroyer escort in World War II. And he always felt very self-conscious about it because seven of his friends were killed when the ship was hit by a kamikaze plane.

[missolesoul]

This song has stayed with me since I first heard on "The Sopranos". I know many of us feel as if this song talks to us. It's an amazing piece. I have it on a list for my funeral in many many years.

[matthewklein]

Absolutely beautiful.Truth personified in Words and Melody.

[zeff]

Happy 25th anniversary to the greatest TV show, and one of the greatest works of fiction, of all time The Sopranos. This song is used at the end of the first episode and I think it fits so perfectly

[fridaythedeerfox]

I just started the sopranos, just finished episode 1, looking forward to the rest

[RandBjunkie]

The movie “Magazine Dreams” brought me here.

[romin]

This is the closest thing to a perfectly written and sung song that I can think of. Thank you Nick.

[juliah]

Just heard this for the first time. The closing song for the Chris O'Dowd remake of Get Shorty. Chilled to the bone. What a song. What a voice.

[amirnahian]

The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day and by night
Rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me

The beast in me
Has had to learn to live with pain
And how to shelter from the rain
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might have to be restrained
God help the beast in me

Sometimes it tries to kid me
That it's just a teddy bear
Or even somehow manage
To vanish in the air
Then that is when I must beware

Of the beast in me
That everybody knows
They've seen him out dressed in my clothes
Patently unclear
If it's New York or New Year
God help the beast in me
The beast in me

[TheRetrostorian]

On my 50th watch of The Sopranos. Used to watch it with my mama now I watch it to remember the good times.

[paulgerkin]

One of the best songs I've ever heard !

[michaelbell]

I just came here, as i watched The Many Saints of Newark last night. that movie was so good! And i got many great songs from it. But i wasn't home enough, when The Sopranos came about. I was in my teens & early 20s & always out on the pub club & 💊 circuit‼️ many many wild horses later. Here i am. 41 & beginning what i hear is 1 of the best TV shows to ever be made! Episode 1 got off to a great start. Now it's 25 years old 😮 lets get stuck in. 📼💿📺📽

[angiebonponsiero]

sopranos brought me here. I've listened to Cash's version and this one, while I love Johnny Cash I have to say that this song is so much deeper and darker when sang by Nick Lowe

[hughjass]

Beautiful, my favorite version. So simple, so painfully sweet.

[pablokerpk]

Música del final del primer capítulo de los sopranos !!

[stevieray]

Nick Lowe just this past summer released an excellent cover version of the Bee Gees-penned “Heartbreaker, ” which was a hit in 1982 for Dionne Warwick. Lowe has been on the other side of that equation in his career. Elvis Costello famously turned his “(What’s So Funny) ‘Bout Peace, Love And Understanding” into a signature anthem. And Lowe also penned a song for his one-time father-in-law Johnny Cash that eventually was recorded by The Man In Black on his acclaimed comeback album with Rick Rubin, 1994’s American Recordings. As it turned out, Lowe’s own version of the song gained its own wide audience thanks to its inclusion in the pilot episode of a television series that turned out to do all right. But more on that in a moment.

Lowe’s original intent was to write a song that would prop Cash up at a career ebb. “It was during that period from the mid-70s up until he started working with Rick Rubin, which was probably the lowest part of his career, ” Lowe said. “He was doing this show at Wembley, which was a big family affair … he wasn’t a well man and he was working his arse off to keep this thing afloat. And I had this idea for a song and Carlene Carter told him about it, and he said, ‘I’ll come ‘round and hear it on the way to Wembley, ’ and he turned up with his whole entourage at our house. And I played him the song, which was incredibly embarrassing because it wasn’t really ready yet. And he said to me, it’s not right but it’s a really good idea … and every time I’d see him after that he’d always ask me, ‘How’s ‘The Beast In Me’ coming on?’ And every time he asked, I’d kind of mentally take it out of the box and look at it again.”

“And finally, after he did a show at the Royal Albert Hall and asked me about it again, I went home and finished it! And then I sent it to him, and I didn’t hear anything, and then my stepdaughter went to stay at his house in Jamaica and she told me, Grampa’s singing your song to everybody … and the next thing I knew, it came out on the American Recordings. I was really thrilled, because it is a good song and he was a brilliant bloke. I really loved him.”

“The Beast In Me” was a perfect fit for Cash, whose impossibly deep voice had the ability to project the song’s complex mixture of menace and vulnerability. What makes the song so clever is how the narrator complains about this alter ego as if it is an entity of malice and destruction completely separate from him. And, as the first verse makes clear, it is hardly containable: “The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars/ Restless by day, and by night/ Rants and rages at the stars.”

The second verse brings some subtle motivation into the picture, with Lowe hinting at some past pain that has caused this Mr. Hyde to emerge from Dr. Jekyll. “And in the twinkling of an eye/ Might have to be restrained, ” he mentions about this monster, suggesting that it can go from charming to unhinged without any warning. In the bridge, the tug of war continues, as the narrator explains just how persuasive and deceptive his other self can be. “That is when I must beware, ” he sings, the melody line deepening as if to warn the listener of the other shoe about to drop.

In the final verse, Lowe implies that the beast is more popular than the restrained part of himself. And his need to rage is unfettered by occasion or location: “They’ve seen him out late in my clothes/ Patently unclear/ If it’s New York of New Year.” The refrain is a cry for mercy: “God help the beast in me.”

Cash got the jump by a few months on Lowe in terms of recording the song, as the songwriter’s own take came out a few months later in 1994 on the album The Impossible Bird. But it was Lowe’s version of “The Beast In Me” which David Chase chose to close out the opening episode of The Sopranos. Those lyrics gave anti-hero Tony Soprano a theme that would characterize him for the remainder of that groundbreaking show, a prime example of a song belatedly finding the ideal setting to showcase its brilliance.

[MortazaHussain-mk]

Watching the first episode for the first time because I was saving the show knowing there will never be shows like that again, even though I don’t know anything of it yet, I know it will be great, and this song when I heard the first tow words of it i i came to look it up

[jodyhoffman]

We all have a beast inside of us that we try to keep hidden.

[sweeneytodd]

Found this Via the Sopranos, I thought it may have been David Bowie before i tracked it down, he has that sound to his voice.
Beautiful tune though, great lyrics and vocals.

[jeshpost]

Aye yo.... my soprano guys!!! T'sup