I love this album

Review Score: (10/10)
Trying to write a review of this album is like attempting to sum up the concept of love in 30 seconds. It's not often I hear music so compelling and beautiful that I want to shout it's name from the rooftops, but with 'Being There', I'm climbing mountains to tell the world (well, writing a review on these pages at least)...
'Being There' has a sheer warmth, like sitting in front of a log fire in mid-winter. It beds you in on the first track, 'Misunderstood', covers you over by 'Red Eyed & Blue' and by the time you get to 'Say You Miss Me', a song which in the wrong hands could have turned out more syrupy than Whitney Houston, but which Tweedy instead renders a perfect love song, all fuzzy headed and glassy eyed, you're pretty much warmed inside out.
On the second disc, there's a little more drama. 'Sunken Treasure' moves like a sinking ship, gently stumbling through choppy waters before giving into the coming storm, subsiding for a few moments, and then relenting again to the hurricane's reprise. Waves crash, and waves are made. Exhausted, you reach for the shore, the sun glinting mercilessly as sand infiltrates your fingernails. Then you realise you've been lying on your bed with headphones on.
'Outta Mind' conjures an almost Christmasy jingle jangle of a sound, in contrast to it's sister 'Outta Sight' on the first disc, which is a straight ahead rock song with a twang, and sounds like it might well have been something Tweedy and Farrar passed up during the Tupelo years.
'Why Would You Want To Live', a brilliant piece of arrangement, awash with multiflourous drumming and percussion, precedes the album's sweetest moment.
'The Lonely 1', seemingly an ode to dreaming of rockstardom, and maybe a message to all of us, sparsely-flecked with delicately twanging guitar and authored by Tweedy's yearning vocal, makes you feel part of Tweedy's band, makes you feel this is your music. And it is.

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