Typing the title (There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me into a post yesterday got me thinking about the use of the bracketed title. When I was just a tiny Foreworder, I used to scrutinise record covers and labels for hours, noting the names of writers and producers and, occasionally, being fascinated by the way titles were carved up using brackets. It seemed to me that, in many cases, the point of the little fellas was to turn what would be an unwieldy title into something more catchy while retaining the meaning: I Never Loved A Man is tragic, I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You) joyful*. Although, adding the ( ) just took up more space on the usually quite crowded label. Sometimes the space was used for parenthetical elucidation, whether simply to do with the recording (“single edit”, “live!”, “part one”, or to tell you the tune was the theme from a movie) or if the title was not English, there might be a translation, such as Se a vida é (That’s The Way Life Is), but usually it was because the artist had something else they wanted to add. Thus: The Old Man’s Back » Continue Reading.