Mid-Point-ish Review of Elvis Costello's "50 Songs for 50 Days"

Four weeks have flown by since Elvis launched "50 Songs for 50 Days." Now, with just 22 days remaining in Costello's musical countdown to the U.S. election, some interesting insights have emerged from his curated collection. First, scan the tables to refresh yourself on the selected songs, and then have a look at the charts. See what you think.

Do you have comments? Questions? Predictions about which songs you expect to join this politically charged mix?  Drop a note in the comments section.

Table 1. Review of Part 1

*Note: "Withered and Died" was released in 1984, but it did not make the cut for Goodbye Cruel World issued in that same year. However, this song was included in the 1995 re-issue of the album, and so both years are included here. For the graph of unique years, I awarded half credit to 1984 and a half to 1995.

Table 2. Review of Part 2

The first point that jumps out to me is that the selected songs are drawn from across the breadth of Elvis Costello's 44-year career (1977 to 2020, and still going strong). There are no more than three songs from any given year. The 28 songs to date fall in one of 17 different years over the range. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Count of songs by year released.

A second and related observation is that these first 28 songs are drawn from 20 different albums with no more than three songs pulled from any one album. This tells me that songs with political tones are scattered across several albums as opposed to being clustered in a few political collections. (See Figure 2.) 

Figure 2: Count of songs by album

I'll update these tables and charts after the 50th day. Meanwhile, do you have any questions? Comments? Do you have any predictions?  

I'll venture a prediction. 

Odds are even that "Tramp the Dirt Down" will make an appearance on or before November 3rd. I guess the only real question is whether any other song in the huge, 600-song EC catalog has a better chance of winning the spot on Day 50, election day in the US of A. 

Leave a note in the comments section with your predictions, questions, or comments, and thanks! 

(Note: the original version of this post has been edited to fix a dataset error. Explanation in comments.)