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 Hooked on a Feeling
by Sarah Harrison
Reading Ed Harcourt's third album song titles — "Strangers," "Loneliness," "Only Happy When You're High" — you might think the British singer-songwriter wants to throw himself off the Millennium Wheel. In fact, he's not out to bring you down. While he clearly loves indulging in the melodrama of emotional upheaval, the songs are too joyful to be cynical. "Loneliness," the album's first single, is a sugary pop confection; "Born in the Seventies," a generational anthem, giggles and sighs about the classic dilemma: "After a length of time / you're this parody / like the record's stopped / always repeating the past." But he comes around by the chorus: "You can count on me / I'm living for the now." In all his songs, the twenty-seven-year-old makes the case that the clichés we experience, loss and melancholy, love and euphoria, should bring us together, instead of making us feel alienated.
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