Setting sails on the long river of Gordon Lightfoot's career...

The author of one of those (in)famous 1000 Records You Need To Listen To Before You Die/Become Deaf/Become Incontinent was asked why in his book  he didn't include a single album by Gordon Lightfoot. His answer was sad, but almost understandable. He said that while Lightfoot made great music, there wasn't a single album that would define him as a artist. Which is totally true. Lightfoot made many very good albums, no bad and only a few mediocre ones. But he never had that one classic album that would catapult him into these 'Best Of' or 'Must Listen'-lists. It's terribly unfair. Some artists or bands can have a career of uninspired mediocrity and still make appearances on these lists if they managed an album that became a modern classic for one reason or another, while Lightfoot toiling away at his craft for more than sicty years isn't repaid in kindness. Lightfoot was kind of always there, and everyone can attest to the beauty of his music, but he hasn't really left his footprint (pun fully intended, thank you very much) on music history. Which is why, nstead of music journalists, we let one of the best ever to do the singer-songwriter thing be the judge, jury and executioner:

If you can't trust Dylan, who can you trust, AmIrite? 

Anyway, so this new Lightfoot project. What happened while I was preparing Shanties is, what usually happens when I launch myself into a new project: I go on a music binge and listen to eveything I have from the artist in question. When I worked on Warren Zevon in January, I listened to almost his entire oeuvre, same for Queen a month later. So working on that Lightfoot comp made me relisten, slowly but surely, to all twenty studio albums, plus Sunday Concert and the two Gord's Gold comps. That is a lot of Lightfoot to listen to. First observation: Yes, the standards are really high, because there is nary a bad song among these hundreds of songs, though that ratio is getting worse in career decades three, four and five. But we'll cross that bridge when we get there. The idea was to make a career retrospective that covers Lightfoot's career from his debut album Lightfoot! in early 1966 all the way to his last album, Solo in 2020. This retrospective will be three CD-length albums chock full of great music,which I will dole out in single installments. If you are anything like me, in between your record collections and the music you download, you probably have way more music than you get to listen to in short order, so this will come slowly and individually to give you time to listen, but thse albums will eventually make up a nice box set of sorts when complete. For the first two write-ups I will run quickly through the albums the songs come from and occasionally why I picked some of them instead of others. 

Today's first installment of A Life In Song is subtitled Long River and covers the period from 1966 to 1971. I didn't put any of Lightfoot' juvenilia, like the horrid MOR country stuff he cut in 1962, on here, because this really is supposed to bring the best of the best, not cover every corner of his long career. So we'll start with four tracks off Lightfoot!, two showing Lightfoot at his purest, with just him and his acoustic guitar on "Long River" and "Sixteen Miles (To Seven Lakes)". Early and often covered classics "Early Morning Rain" and "Steel Rail Blues" complete the line-up before  giving way to the "Ballad Of Yarmouth Castle" which I have discussed in great length on Shanties. Let me just add here that, on second thought, it being left off his studio albums of the time was probably more a question of bad timing rather than some sort of conspiracy. He debuted the title in January 1966, right after the release of his debut album, but then it was another 15 months before the follow-up, so by that time the topical "ballad" was a bit passé. Next is a song that is a bit of departure for Lightfoot, the very jngle jangle-y "Spin Spin" that dutifully became a hit in Canada and nowhere else and for some reason will not get a decent release from United Artists. This is a version of the song that he recut in Nashville, possibly for a U.S. release that never happened, but it's more driving and, uh, jingle jangle-y, so it gets the nod over the original single version. 

The Way I Feel was a decent follow-up to Lightfoot's debut, here presented by "If You Got It", where Lightfoot sounds so youthful and happy, that I simply had to include it, and "Go-Go Round", which has one of the album's most memorable melodies. And then there's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy", a total classic, and probably in the top ten of Lightfoot songs. Epic storytelling, in every sense of the word. The following year's Did She Mention My Name? has the great title song (with two lines that always make me smile - "Is the landlord still a loser? Do his signs still hang in the hall?"), the vaguely protest song adjacent "Boss Man" with some interesting backing vocals and the two magnificent ballads "Wherefore And Why" and "The Mountains And Maryann", that with their orchestrations would point to Lightfoot's future. Follow-up Back Here On Earth from later in the year has classic ballads "Bitter Green" and "The Circle Is Small" (a decade later pointlessly remade by Lightfoot) and, as a more personal favorite, "Long Way Back Home", one of Lightfoot's numerous wanderlust numbers. 

Sunday Concert was a contractual obligation album, the mandatory live album to get out of his contract with United Artists, but at least Lightfoot loaded it with a number of unreleased songs, including "Ballad Of Yarmouth Castle" and "Apology, the latter of which is feautured here. He signed with Reprise, hoping that they could break him through in the U.S. His debut for Reprise, starting his collaboration with producer Lenny Waronker, was indeed the commercial breakthrough Lightfoot had hoped for, though it took a bit of time. Originally entitled Sit Down Young Stranger, it really took off when "If You Could Read My Mind" stormed the charts in early 1971, more than eight months after the album was released. It was thus dutifully retitled If You Could Read My Mind. If you had to pick an album that comes as close as possible to representing him, it probably would be this one for the early folkie years. Sure, there's more orchestration than on most UA albums, but this is sort of the ideal album of Lightfoot the romantic bard. It was also the first Lightfoot album I ever bought and I love it dearly, resulting in it being represented by a whooping five songs. Even then I had to leave a song like "Cobwebs & Dust" on the outs. Tough choices, everywhere. 

This collection ends with three tracks from 1971's Summer Side Of Life. The title song is so jaunty and well, sunny, that you can easily overhear the lyrics about the young man, seemingly a Vietnam war vet, crying all day long. Like in the equally featured "Sit Down Young Stranger", Lightfoot acknowledges that war ithout taking specific political sides, other than a general 'war isn't great'-attitude. As I stated in my first write-up for Shanties, he felt uncomfortable as a decideldly political writer or protest singer, so contemporary concerns mostly bubble up as subtext. Also featured are the lovely "10 Degrees & Getting Colder", another song about being on the roaad, and his ode to Canadian unity, "Nous Vivons Ensemble", featured here in slightly edited form. 

And that's it, that's Gordon Lightfoot's Life in Song, Vol. 1, with two more volumes coming up in the next weeks to complete this career-spanning box set courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood blogger OBG. So, get on that long river and let yourself be carried by some wonderful melodies and performances of Mr. Gordon Meredith Lightfoot. 

Deja Vu on Starboard, Sir, Deja Vu On Starboard...

'Huh?' you might be thinking, 'is good ol' OBG getting senile early'? Did he forget that he just posted this very Gordon Lightfoot comp a few weeks ago? No, no, he didn't. Call it Shanties 2.0. Call it fixin'. Call it whatever you want, but the fact is that Shanties was a good idea, but the execution could have been better. Now I could just sneak back and post the new version of Shanties in the old write-up, but no one in particular would see, notice or care. Given the absence of any coments activity in the last weeks, it's already hard to see whether any of you fine folks see,notice, or care, so I wasn't just gonna rework that and leave it in the dust pile of posts come and gone. But don't worry, after the re-worked Shanties, we'll get to some more Gordon Lightfoot. As a matter of fact, the next months we'll all be light on our feet around here...

So, what caused me giving Shanties another look? Well, listening back to Gordon Lightfoot's entire discography, for one thing, for that big Lightfoot project coming your way very soon. Listening back to albums I hadn't listened to in about twenty years revealed that I had simply forgotten two songs that were perfect for the concept. "Marie Christine", with "Ballad Of The Yarmouth Castle" M.I.A. for three years, is thus the very first of Gordon's boat songs. But it is somewhat hidden in the middle of Back Here On Earth, an album I don't much listen to, so I completely forgot about it. As for the other forgotten shanty, "Triangle", well, I first heard that one as one of the really wet, misbegotten re-recordings Lightfoot did on Gord's Gold Vol. 2. 

While the re-recordings of his United artists material on Gord's Gold made sense commercially (instead of licensing tracks, Warner Brothers preferred to just recut them if necessary), they also made sense artistically: Lightfoot would rework the songs in his then current folk-pop style including orchestrations and steel guitar, hallmarks of his mid-70s style. But the re-recordings on Gord's Gold Vol. 2 made no sense and served no purpose, and to take MOR-leaning material and making it even mushier by having everything sound more artificial and flat was a terrible idea. So I had "Triangle" written off as a failure, and thus didn't listen back to it in preparing Shanties. When I did relisten to Lightfoot's collected works, I was surprised how good 1982's Shadows, of which "Triangle" comes, actually is. This was, for me, the first album that really dipped into the MOR-sound that would define his 80s albums, but it's sharper and better than I remembered it, and certainly better than the Gord's Gold Vol. 2 remakes make it sound.  

And finally, I threw off a track because "Sea Of Tranquillity", despite its name, is mainly about critters living in the woods, something Lightfoot himself pointed out in his song comments for Songbook. Switch critters for sea creatures: I finally decided to re-install "Ode To Big Blue", which was originally on the short list, into the line-up. Again, relistening made me realize that the song was better than I remembered it, and is deserving of a spot on Shanties. 

So here's the improved Shanties, now having a more fitting ten tracks for 44 minutes of music, all ready to leave port and take you out into the oceans, once more. If you liked the first version of Shanties, then you'll obviously like this, bigger, better and bolder than before. So, heave away, boys, heave away...

...and be back in a day or two, for the start of OBG's big Lightfoot project around here...

Caroline Now! Or, A Better Bye Bye To Bri...

When I reposted my two Beach Boy alt albums last week to commemorate Brian Wilson's passing, it wasn't a particularly great solution, mainly because those two albums - great as they are, and they are plenty great - didn't feature Brian a lot. But, as said in that write-up, I browsed through the virtual Brian Wilson and Beach Boys archives on my computer and didn't find anything that was in 'ready to post' shape. Call it a sign of the times. Because what I didn't do was browse my physical music collection for something fitting to post, otherwise I would have happened upon Caroline Now! The Songs of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys right away. Now, the fact that I didn't think of that album right away, tells you that it isn't in heavy rotation, and truth be told, I had a bit forgotten about it. But if the goal is to clebrate Wilson and his songwriting, it is a particularly fitting choice and listening back to it is also better than I remember. 

Caroline Now! is the antithesis to the 'stars go and cut a classic, well-known number by an artist' modus of a lot of tribute albums that results often in well-meaning karaoke.. And I say that as someone who likes well-done well-meaning karaoke from time to time. The concept of Caroline Now! was to focus not on the usual big songs, but rather the more unknown songs of Brian Wilson, done by some very modestly known musicians. The biggest name on here is probably Alex Chilton, who has been One Buck Record-ed before, or depending on your preferences St. Etienne or The High Llamas, all affirmed and obvious Beach Boy fans. Anothe really obvious fan of the Boys' music if obviously Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake, who contributes a lovely reading of "Only With You". This project actually grew out of sessions that involved Blake and Chilton in Scotland under the direction of musical directors David Scott (of The Pearlfishers) and Duglas T. Stewart (of BMX Bandits),  and then grew to include indie artists from around the world contributing a song to the planned compilation, until it grew to 24 tracks. It then came out on a tiny German record label.  

So, while I played with the idea of tightening the album up a bit, I finally didn't because different folks might find songs I'm not too fond of to their liking, and since this is out of print for about 24 years I figure those who want to hear it, should hear it in its entirety. I did, however, reseuence the whole album, because that was one of my peeves with it. It had about five of my least-liked songs on this thing in the first ten tracks, so for me it never built much momentum. There's a reason why I had pretty much forgotten about this album. So, my resequencing hopefully help with that, it definitely doesn't hurt.

Personal highlights include the radio Sweethearts' country-rock take on "Honkin' Down The Highway", Spanish trio Souvenir's 60's girl group-ish French-language take on "Girl I Can Tell" (as "Ne Dis Pas"), The Pearlfishers' "Go Away Boy" and Kle's "fabulous "Rainbow Eyes", which was part of Wilson's unreleasd Sweet Insanity album. If you like 80s and 9s cult bands Belle And Sebastian, The Vaselines, The Apstels, or Orange Juice - you'll find key members doing tracks here. The producers even recruited some contemporaries: 60's pop band The Free Design reunited after thirty years for this project and their lovely take on "Endless Harmony" (which for me personally blows the original out of the water), Alex Chilton is here - as mentioned - and the album ends with L.A. gadfly/producer/manager/svengali/charlatan/hipster Kim Fowley and his take on "Almost Summer". 

So, this is a much better and more fitting to sweet, crazy ol'  Brian Wilson, the gentle giant of songwriters. Just listen...and remember...it's almost summer...and an endless harmony...

Spend a wam spring evening on the backporch...with Sierra And Chase

It's springtime...almost summer. actually here today you'd say it's the dog days of August with a frankly too damn hot 35+ degrees. If we were futher south, we ould hear the crickets sing. Or, you know, we ca bring the crickets to you, together with some sweet, failiar melodies in some sweet vocal harmony. Springtime could also men hanging out on the front  or back porch, having someone pull out an acoustic guitar and just jam on some ol' songs you like. And if the person who picks up the guitar is an Eagleson, all the better. The imagined debut album of Sierra Eagleson did surprisingly strong numbers in January - and deservedly so - and the eagle-sonned eagle-eyed among you might have seen the name Chase Eagleson already in my re-imagined Kurt Cobain musical extravaganza, when I needed an Elvis impersonator (don't ask...or read about it in the write-up) and Chase's fantastic version of "Can't Help Falling In Love" fit like a glove. Yes, in the Eagleson family, talent runs deep as both siblings have their own career doing moody acoustic cover verions of popular songs, both old and new. Chase is also a bit of a handsome devil, so that's almost unfair.

 Anyway, the answer to the old question of 'What's better than an Eagleson?' is of course 'Two Eaglesons', especially if they are singing in harmony together. Beautiful stuff, as you will hear on the album of the day. The two have duetted dozens of time, but for this album I only chose songs that I really liked - covering "Hey Ya!" as a slow, downbeat, acoustic number inches a bit too close to novelty for my taste - and I also included one solo number each, Chase covering Radiohead's "Falke Plastic Trees" and Sierra Peter Gabriel's classic "Solsbury Hill" (also recorded with some birds and other beasts contributing...). Chase is indeed a bit of a Radiohead-head, also covering "High and Dry" with Sierra. On that song, as on others, Chase sings on top and Sierra takes the low harmony, to often stunning effect. 

Chase and Sierra are alternating lead vocals here in a deliberate sequencing decision. Their cover of "Landslide" has some beautiful Banjo picking, It's part of the opening trio of classic 70s hits that the Eaglesons have probably heard in the music collection of their parents, the others are Gary Wriht's "Dream Weaver" and James Taylor's "Carolina In My Mind", which opens the album. Not with an acoustic strum, but some bird chirping, as they recorded that one in a nature park of some sort, so you have the natural choir of bird voices in the background of the song. And then, to show that they (and me) are not only classic rock-retro-minded, I programmed Gorillaz' "On Memory Hill" and the aforementioned "Fake Plastic Trees" afterwards. Later a cover of indie-folkster Gregory Alan Isakov also shows up, flanked by some other 70s gold like "Your Song". And the album ends on a familiar note - at least if you have listened to Brush Fire - as Sierra goes back to her moody cover of Springsteen's "Dancing In The Dark", here as a duet medley with Chase singing "I'm On Fire". 

If you were mean-spirited - which I'm sure most of my readers aren't - you could call this high quality karaoke. But I think that would do these covers a grave injustice. Chase and Sierra find notes and nuances in these songs that maybe wasn't there in the first place. When even an old, mildly hoary warhorse like "Your Song" cn be turned into a winner, we're onto something here. So, sit down on the back porch with Chae and Sierra and their guitars, let the bird and beasts around you add their ten cents and and spend a lovely evening listening to these siblings picking and harmonising... 

So long Brian, say hello to the Boys...

A little under two hours after I had put out Le Trip yesterday, the news came down that Brian Wilson died. Damn. I mean, he had a longer and richer career than someone seeing him holed up as a fat, psychotic wreck in the early and mid-70s would have thought, including a frankly astonishing flurry of projects in his third act. Not all of these projects were great or even all that useful - did we need Brian reimagining Gershwin or covering his favorite Disney tunes? - but the fact that he stayed active in the music business after all these years was certainly something not many bet on in the mid-70s or one decade later when he was under the indluence of uor favorite charlatan and mine, Dr. Eugene Landy. Now he's gone, and all the Wilson brothers are gone, while Mike Love can still goof around stages with his fake Boys. Why the hell are all the talented Beach Boys gone and the scrubs remain? 

Anyhoo, be that as it may, especially since some guys the Boys drafted in when Brian was...uh...indisposed did a hell of a job. No, I'm not thinking of Bruce Johnston, who is almost as awful as Mike'n'Al, but of the Durban Beach Boys Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin. You can probably see where this is going, folks. Is this a shameless attempt to lead to the two Durban-Beach Boy era albums I re-imagined? Yes, yes it is. Thing is, I quickly went through the archives yesterday evening and don't have anything purely or mainly Brian ready for publication, that isn't someone else's work. So I'm going back to my re-imaginings of Carl & The Passions - 'So Tough', on these pages known as All This Is That, and of Holland, which has become the double album epic Sail On Sailor. (You van find out more about thes eprojects in their original write-ups, should you be so inclined). There is some Brian in there - the arrangement for "Marcella" can only come from one man - and some of his dream-like music for the extremely odd Mount Vernon And Fairway-Suite has been saved as "The Pied Piper (A Dream Voyage)". 

No, these aren't specifically Brian albums, but they are fine albums, full of inventive, fresh music that should have given them more attention in the early 70s, before Endless Summer and their own 15 Big Ones turned them irrevocably into an oldies act. Why not listening to these while you say goodbye to the last Wilson brothers? In the band, Brian always was the brain, and Carl was the soul, while Dennis was, uh, the libido and the muscle, probably. Now all Wilson brothers have sailed from us, but their fantastic music remains. 

Sail on sailors, sail on...

R.I.P. Brian Douglas Wilson, 1942 - 2025

The French Connection: Salut, Les Copains...Voulez-Vous Faire Un Trip?

So, time to slowly ramp up all my long dormant, but still ongoing series. So, let's see what's what music-wise in my adopted homeland. The title of our One Buck Record of the day is of course a reference to The Trip, this site's one-off trip into garage rock. As I will be the first to tell you, I'm absolutely no authority on that particular subset of music, and the sheer volume of it - there must now be hundreds of comps out there I'd gather - is truly daunting, so I'll leave that to the experts. Truth be told, I had some of these fun tracks lying around and wanted to post something a little different, and that was that. Now, there might've been French garage rockers - and two or three do sow up on Le Trip, notably Les Guitares Du Dimanche - but overall, this isn't necessarily even rock, just some cool ass music from the 60s coming out of la France. 

I also didn't shy away from using the big guns, if there was a good song coming with 'em: La belle Bardot, getting two spots, one in her classic duet with Srege Gainsbourg? Check. The French Elvis, good ol' Johnny Halliday with "Les Coups", an adaptation of ,Stevie Wonder's "Uptight"? Check. French idol Michel Polnareff, who is still touring these days at the tender age of 80, with his classic "La Poupée Qui Fait Non"? Check. Speaking of, here's a relatively little-known fact to win a trivia quiz with your rock'n'roll friends: Who is playing guitar on Michel Polnareff's "La Poupée Qui Dit Non"? Why, it's Jimmy Page! And who's playing bass? Oh look, it's John Paul Jones. Yup, half of Led Zeppelin is playing on it! La classe! Moving on, Claude Nougaro has a bad case of (Peggy Lee''s) "Fever" and neegs to go see the "Docteur". 

And who could forget the famous Ye-Ye Girls, even though that term hardly captures the sometimes brilliant work they did. This is of course especially true for Françoise Hardy, about whom I have already written extensively. I still had to include her moody "Tous Les Graçons Et Le Filles" and "C'est e Temps de L'Amour", both stone-cold classics that no collection of great French tunes from the 60s should be without out. Rarely has anyone made melancholy as catchy as Mrs. Hardy here. I also love Jaqueline Taieb's "7 H Du Mat", which as the album opener gives a bit the tone of the compilation: a little irreverent, a little sexy, a little bit of rockn'roll rebellion. Unlike The Trip, Le Trip also has a bunch of jazzy undertones. Staying with the ladies, special mention also goes to another actress-cum-singer, Jeanne Moreau whose "Le Tourbillon" should be a much better known classic, Also pretty cool are Michèle Lagrange and "Si Ma Chanson Pouvait" and Suzanne Gabriello's "Votez, Hein, Bon!", which is really close to being a novelty song, but falls just on the right side of the line. 

As for oddities, we have author Boris Vian, best known for L'écume du jour, who was also an accomplashished jazz musician and speak-sings hisway through "Je Suis Snob", while Jean Bernard De Libreville's "La Juxtaposition 210" is almost avant garde. The aforementioned Guitares Du Dimanche should probably pay some royalties to the Kinks for "Sur Une Nappe De Restaurant", which sounds a lot like "All Day And All Of The Night", and goes to show that even in France garage rock was well and alive in the 60s... 

There are also two lucky charms that aren't French in the pack: Both Luckies Alba and Jones are Belgian, but hey, who's counting right? There be dragons! Or mussels...from Brussles! Jones' "Plus En Plus Fort", is an adaptation of "(Do The) Mashed Potatoes", joining othet beat grouops like The Kingsmen, The Rattles or The Undertakers in covering that tune. 

So, listen to this and transport yourself back into the 60s to the Côte D'Azur with a portable radio or into a hip Parisian jazz club...alors, tout le monde, êtes-vous prêt à faire Le Trip?  

Stealin' Some Queen Songs...And Turnin' 'Em Into A Pretty Cool Album...

If you remember where we left things with Queen and ... Just Another Miracle, the auto-assignment seemed simple: gather up the outtakes and b-sides from the The Miracle era, sequence them et voilà...an album that never was to go with  the alt Miracle and wrap up the OBG work on that boxset. Which is what I did in assembling a first version of the album. But, as it so happens, something happened then that gave the whole project a whole different direction. My assembled album was missing something. On a Cd of outtakes I had this demo version of "Stealin'", a version I have always preferred to the finished one that made it out as a b-side. The finished "Stealin'" has all the hallmarks of The Miracle-era Queen: It sounds hyperprocessed, with glossy keyboard additions that don't seem to add anything, instead choking whatever spontaneity the track once had. Compare that to the demo version, with its overddubbed vocals of Freddie playfully ("So do I"), and funnily answering himself ("So do I!"). That track, while a fully finished demo/run through, is all spontaneity. So I set out to find it, to add that second version as a 'Reprise' version at the end, a trick some of you are now very familiar with when I can't make the hard choice between two versions of a song. 

But to my surprise I found the uncut, eleven minute+ tape of that run through version of "Stealin'", instead of the four and a half minute excerpt of the main song part that I had. Color me intrigued. Turns out that they were doing extended riffs with instruments dropping in and out ad Mercury improvising lyrics. I really liked the loose nature of what was essentially a jam session, with Roger Taylor especially relishing to bash away on the skins (check out his drum rols towards the end of "Stealin' Part III). So, instead of simply having a second version of "Stelin'" I scratched that idea and rebuilt the album entirely around the various parts of "Stealin'". 

The whole eleven minute plus mix was too long and had too many slow spots with the band waiting around to see what to do next. The two most song-like parts were thus turned into "Heart Keeper (Stealin' Part II)" and "Money ("Stealin' Part III)".  Interestingly, during two of the 'waiting parts' Brin May played some Blues licks which I edited together for the (very short) "Stealin' Blues". The album was then sequenced around these four song parts, with "Stealin'" obviously the album opener and "Money (Stealin' Part III)" as the album closer wth Part II showing up towards the middle. Brian May's ballad "You Know You Belong To me" (a solo demo brought to the Miracle sessions) was a logical side A closer, while "Hang On In There", a b-side that could (and probably should) have replaced some of the weaker songs on The Miracle made for a great side b opener. .

There is no way to ignore the somewhat fragmentary nature of this album. A number of songs are rather short, either by design as b-side or demo or because I had to edit what was worth keeping out of longer, but messier songs. I had to do some editing to "I Guess We're Falling Out", because this was clearlly a run through rather than a fully finished take, and Freddie yelled out some instructions before the jam session at the end. Now, I love that little jam session - coming after one of the most classic sounding Queen numbers - but wanted to keep it as a finished studio track as possible, so anything that soundedlike not being part of the song had to go.  I also amused myself by following up Brian's "Water (another solo demo) with Freddie's "No Water", which is the improvised second part of the "A New Life Is Born" intro to "Beakthrough" featured on the original album. Anyway, think of the sequence of short songs in a variety of styles after the opening trio as a tribute to Sheer Heart Attack, which was more or less like that. 

Of the outtakes "Face It Alone" was chosen as the single to promote the The Miracle box set, so it has a much more polished sound (and possibly some autotune?) than the others, but that's the nature of the beast. Roger Taylor gets, like Brian May, two compositions and lead vocals, which sounds about right for a Queen album: Both were used as b-sides. Synth rocker "Hijack My Heart" (with some heavy shredding by Brian) is an interesting diversion, while "Dog With A Bone", with shared lead vocals by Freddie, is one of his slightly knuckleheaded rockers. The b-side "My Life Has Been Saved", co-written by Freddie and John, was later reworked for Made in Heaven. 

Anyway, that's a lot of info on the why and how of an alt album. Suffice it to say that I think this is a really nice companion piece to ...Just Another Miracle, and I hope you'll agree. Now go and steal some really good Queen music...