Monthly Archives: May 2026

#1408: Blur – Tracy Jacks

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Only four songs from Parklife on here, huh? That makes sense for me. Really, it should be six, but I was going through a period, when I was doing the G section, where I was questioning whether or not I actually liked ‘Girls & Boys’. I do. And I’m a big fan of ‘The Debt Collector’. But it’s too late to change things now. I wouldn’t argue with anyone who says Blur’s 1994 album is their best. It is a definite classic, a touchstone in the Britpop era. It’s not my favourite album of the band’s, though. The compositions are concise, very well-produced and the songwriting’s stellar. But I’ve always felt there’s something very… clean about Parklife. Like, the songs sound a little too perfect, nearly mechanical somehow. It works for the songs I really like and have written about before, but throughout a whole album, I don’t know, seems a little strange for my ears. I’m probably one of the few who prefers The Great Escape because of this, even if it does get dismissingly labelled as Parklife’s sequel.

All that being said, I’ve still got a lot of love for ‘Tracy Jacks’. It’s the second song on Parklife. I’m not sure I cared all that much for it when I went through the album in full the first time in 2013. But Blur were up and about again. The band had done Coachella that year. They’d done Glastonbury in 2009. They played in Hyde Park after the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Those performances were on YouTube. ‘Tracy Jacks’ was played at all of them. Had to guess it was quite the popular deeper cut among the fans. And general repeated listens to it over the years made the track more endearing. It’s another of Damon Albarn’s character sketch songs, which he was all over in the mid-’90s, concerning a fellow whose name makes the song’s title. Tracy Jacks leads a somewhat mundane lifestyle. As he feels the end of his days rapidly approaching as he passes the age of 40, he seeks out thrills, but probably goes off the deep end with the biggest act of bulldozing his own house down. There’s maybe a little bit of Tracy Jacks in all of us, but, you know, gotta keep him suppressed because society looks down upon the things he does in the song.

The big thing that gets to me in this one? I think it’s the vocals by Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon. Coxon calls out ‘Tracy Jacks’ repeatedly in the verses, a hook in themselves, with Albarn responding with the character’s situations in each line. And this goes on before the two sing together on the choruses, Coxon taking the higher harmony, coming down on the cathartic “Just so overrated” line before rinsing and repeating. I like the sort of marching rhythm the track takes on during those sections too. Thinking about it further, Graham Coxon might just be the main man throughout the whole thing. Everything from the guitar chords during the verses, the lines he’s pulling off during the choruses, the alternating between the two during the outro, the echoing siren-like wails during the break. They’re all like little melodic trips in themselves, they really burrow themselves into the noggin. After the excitement ad hype ‘Girls & Boys’ starts everything off with, it’s nice that ‘Tracy Jacks’ lets things ride out a little. Contains the same appeal, but just a little smoother.

#1407: Feeder – Tracing Lines

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Back in 2009 or so, I really got into the habit of adding song lyrics onto websites. Clearly, this was a 14-year-old who knew what to do with his time. One website that I used very, very regularly was letssingit.com Still got my account on there and everything. I went under the name ‘Jammerz’ and, as you can see through this archived link from September 2010, I was the moderator for Feeder’s page on there. I’m very sure the lyrics you see for ‘Tracing Lines’ everywhere now are based on those I originally typed out on LetsSingIt on August 17th 2009. The same day I added the band’s most recent album then, Silent Cry. Got one lyric wrong though. “She’s my direction, down to the south” is very clearly, “Changed my direction, turned to the south.” But the former was what I heard at the time. And that’s how I came to know the song. Writing the lyrics while simultaneously watching its music video via YouTube.

‘Tracing Lines’ took me for a bit of a surprise when I first heard it. Silent Cry, its parent album, was released in 2008. The video for its first single ‘We Are the People’ was maybe played once or twice – that I saw – on TV. I’m not sure I liked it. And the very limited coverage around the album at the time probably made me think Feeder weren’t what they used to be. But fast-forward to 2009, I find ‘Tracing Lines’, and it sounded like one of those classic Feeder songs that could have been included on their ’06 Singles compilation. It made me think why the label or whoever didn’t release this as the “comeback” single instead. Guitarist and songwriter Grant Nicholas can write really good power pop tunes whenever he wants, and ‘Tracing Lines’ comes under that group. Catchy from the get-go with the easy chord progression. Taka Hirose and Mark Richardson respectively join in with the bass guitar and drums alongside the keyboard/guitar lick. An easy-to-follow melody with a standard song structure, the chorus being the usual standout moment. It’s all there, all very nicely executed.

When it comes to what the song’s about, I’ve never stopped to think it through. Even if I did transcribe the words all them years ago, it was more so I could just sing along. But looking at them now and hearing the track, I think ‘Tracing Lines’ is generally about travelling, especially from the point of view of a man in a rock band like Grant Nicholas was and is. He had a dream/vision of being in a band when he was younger, changed his direction in life to follow that path, and now he finds himself going from here to there and back again as he tours and does the things a working musician has to do. He wishes he could take a rest, but he loves what he does and finds new ways to bring enthusiasm into it. The tracing lines part, I think, comes from a notion that we’re all kind of leaving our own footprints behind wherever we go, wherever we travel, but we don’t necessarily see them. In Nicholas’s case, his lines will usually intersect as he goes back to a place he may have been to years before and do so on much more frequent basis than your average person you see on the street. So that’s my take. I hope you enjoy the song too.