Richard Thompson, “Good Things Happen To Bad People” (2013): Something Else! sneak peek

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“Good Things Happen to Bad People,” the guitar-stoked advance song from Richard Thompson’s forthcoming long-player Electric, finds him bellowing with a bracing vigor. There’s a knife’s edge to both his singing and his playing.

Seems Thompson’s tangled up with a runaround girl, and even as he recognizes his own predicament (the title of the song says it all), there’s a sense that he’s not going to sit with this for much longer: “I know you’ve been bad,” Thompson sings ruefully, “from the way you smile.”

Thompson then tears into an angular, hell-raising solo — one part stunned disbelief and two parts boiling pissed-offed-ness … and every part of it utterly cathartic.

Electric is due February 11, 2013 via Proper Records. A UK tour then gets going on February 20, with a trip into America to follow in March of 2013.

Nick DeRiso