Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Bluegrass Chartbusters Ahead! Yeehaw and Hotdiggity!


If you have followed this blog for a bit, you already know that, when not listening to folks giving it a neo-traditional spin, I like my bluegrass...weird-ish. I'm down with folks putting hip hop and bluegrass together, and I'm down with a couple of Finns doing bluegrass covers of hard'n'heavy songs. So, it's fair to say I'm not a traditionalist. Still, I wouldn't have bet on engulfing myself as much as I did in bluegrass groups covering popular songs, and I certainly hadn't expected to do so with the help of the Pickin On... series. After albums highlighting bluegrass covers of single artists like Neil Young and Green Day, time to take it a step further and wander through more than fifty years of charts history...via the all-new Bluegrass Chartbusters series!

This album that runs through songs from 1968 to 2015 also doubles as a bit of a Best Of of Cornbread Red, for my money the best band that worked for CMH and the Pickin' On...-series. These guys burned brightly, and quickly - relatively speaking of course - going through ten tribute albums in three years...and then just vanished. Cornbread Red were built around three bluegrass veterans: Stan Dailey on lead vocals and bass, Marc Scott on banjo and mandolin, and Dennis Clifton on guitar, dobro and bouzouki. They recorded those famous blugrass tributes to, among others, Franz Ferdinand, Aerosmith, The Offspring, and Maroon 5, as well as doing the lion's share of the label's two classic rock tributes, from which a majority of their tracks were sourced. Bluegrass bands covering pop and rock songs can always come off as gimmicky and joke-y, and that's kind of the point in a way, but these guys actually found the essence of the songs, instead of just doing fun covers. 

Which means that their versions of these rock and pop classics (and semi-classics) have now supplanted the originals for me. Their version of "Comfortably Numb" is my favorite version of that song, bar none. I've never liked Roger Waters' vocals on the original. I've always liked the melody of "Here Without You" by Three Doors Down, but the compressed nu rock production didn't do it any favors. It's not needed anymore, as isn't the smooth sounds of Maroon 5, whose "You Will Be Loved" is much better as a bluegrass tune than a soft pop number. And finally, I'd probably go out and say that Cornbread Red's version of The Offspring's "Self-Esteem" is also my new favorite take on that number. I liked Steve'n'Seagulls' version fine enough, but that one really tipped over onto the humour side, whereas Cornbread Red's version really finds a sort of logical variation for it, protraying the protagonist loser like a country bumpkin who's getting abused and is too nice to do something about it. You should also check out what they do with Cheap Trick's "Surrender". Good stuff. 

The other 'name' band in CMH's employ is of course Iron Horse out of Alabama (below), who are taking care of the majority of the other tracks here, including Kansas' "Carry On Wayward Son", a cool version of Steve Miller Band's "The Joker", lovely takes on Van Morrison' "Into The Mystic" and Elton John's "Rocket Man", as well as a cover of Kings Of Leon's "Molly's Chambers", the only non-chartbuster here, but a cool version of a cool song, that got the band noticed in the first place. The third band in the Pickin On... stable is The Sidekicks, who more or less replaced Cornbread Red on the roster, though they seem to be less like a real working band and more like a bunch of varying studio pros drafted in for the occasion. Be that as it may,  their take on Hanson's "Mmmbop", for example, does two things: make you understand the lyrics for the first time (try that on the spead up mickey mouse voiced original) and make you appreciate the song (although adult Hanson's acoustic readings of their song are very good as well). They also have a nice, drawl-y take on Blind Melon's "No Rain", their version of Imagine Dragons' "I Bet My Life" is clearly an improvement on the original (not that hard) and a cover of Hootie & The Blowfish's "Only Wanna Be With You". 

This is a fun, rollickin' time, offering often beautiful takes on some of the best known songs from the last half decade. You don't even need to be a particular big fan of bluegrass, armed with even a basic appreciation of acoustic or country-tinged music you'll probably find something to like here. Yeehaw, let the good times roll...





Saturday, July 19, 2025

Mixtape Mania Returns! Bowie's Back! In A Ton Of Different Languages!

And the enunciations continue! Stop the press! Hot from the mixing desk! That's Right! Can't Stop Won't Stop!

O.k., enough of this nonsense. But yeah, holiday pastime Bowie mixing is back. It might not have seemed that way, because I spread out my little Bowie mixtapes/megamixes over a year and a half of One Buck Records time, but these were all done in summer 2023, along with the 2.Downtown continuation of the Nathan Adler diaries. And by the end of the summer, I was very well mixed out and Bowie'd out, so I bowed out of Bowie mixing endeavors for a good long while.  But while sorting through my music folders a month or so ago, I realized that at the time I had put a bunch of songs aside for two further mixes, including one with a thematic hook that I really wanted to do. 

And wouldn't you know it, it's the first week of holidays for me, so I could get to work right away, and Bowie mixtape no. 5, fresh from OBG's mixing desk, is here. And if the name of the mix, Babel, hasn't tipped you off yet - it's the first one with a clearly defined theme: Bowie has dabbled, for most of his career, in recording in different languages to cater to his fans worldwide. No one can accuse Bowie of not being a cunning linguist...   

Sometimes he cut a foreign language version because he loved the coutry or the language, as in his two Indonesian-language songs, and sometimes as a career move, such as trying to catch the attention of German schlager listeners in 1967 with a 'German version' (basically one German verse followed by most of the song in English) of "Love You 'Till Tuesday". The same idea is essentially true for the Italian adaptation of "Space Odyssey". Bowie was told that Italians wouldn't get the whole spaceship astronaut thing, so the song was turned into "Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola" - lonely boy, lonely girl. How do you say 'lost in translation' in Italian? 

Some of these tracks went nowhere, such as a barely released Spanish version of "Day-In, Day-Out", others were little gifts to fans, such as the Japanese version of "Girls" as Bowie's habitual bonus track for the Japanese album version of Never Let Me Down, or the French and German adaptations of "Heroes" on those countries' versions of the album of the same name. I also went back to his Berlin trilogy for the Turkish-flavored parts of "Yassassin" and the wordless vaguely Eastern-inspired wailing of"Warszawa", as well as the African rhythms of "African Night Flight" and a snatch of Japanese from "It's No Game". The atmosphere of "Abdulmajid" seemed to fit, so that instrumental track got mixed in as well. This is not supposed to be an 'all non-English music of Bowie, ever' thing, but pretty much everything of significance that isn't English should be here. 

Here's the tally of Bowie's Babel: 2x German, 2x Italian, 2x Indonesian, 1x Spanish, 1x French, 1x Mandarin, plus the above mentioned bits and bops, for the usual 30 minutes of Bowie. 

Bowie the chameleon is one of those easy catchphrases for the genre-hopping artist, but he is also - and definitely -  a chameleon in terms of dealing with these foreign languages. I obviously can't speak for how well he pulls off Indonesian, Japanse and Mandarin, but the Spanish sounds okay. He clearly doesn't speak German and manages with phonetics, while Italian seems to come naturally to him. His accent in French is pretty atrocious, though. But these versions are often more than pure gimmicks, and seem to have been important for Bowie, at one stage or another of his career. Now they can all be enjoyed in one easily digestable 30 minute package which I hope you will enjoy. In any language. 


Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Michael Johnson's First...And Finest...Feel The Breeze


You know what these All Pearls, No Swine albums are actually good for, besides providing you with a cool 70 minutes of quality music from decades past? Encountering artists you hadn't heard of before, as they did for me, obviously! So today's album is a follow-up to stumbling onto Michael Johnson's cover of Jackson Browne's "My Opening Farewell" on You Tube, then checking out more of Johnson from the same time period. As I opined in my write-up for All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 22, I think Johnson's confident take on the song is better than Browne's original, and it's one of the highlights of There Is A Breeze, our One Buck Record of the day. I hadn't heard of Michael Johnson before, though I'm sure some of y'all oldtimers remember him from an interesting, topsy-turvy career. 

Johnson's first brush with fame came in 1968 when he was drafted into The Mitchell Trio to replace last remaining original member Mike Kobluk, which led Chad Mitchell to disallow the use of his name, with the remaining trio thus becoming Denver, Boise & Johnson, releasing a lone single ("Take Me to Tomorrow") before splitting up. Johnson took some time to plan his next step, stepping away from trecording and touring to star in the off broadway musical Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well and Living In Paris (great title, by the way!).  He signed with Atco Records in 1971, but it took until 1973 for his debut album, the very One Buck Record of the day, to be released. It did only local business in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, so Johnson labored on until The Michael Johnson Album in 1978 with its Top 20 hit "Bluer Than Blue" broke him into the mainstream, albeit as a pure soft rock artist, and those late 70s tracks have a decidedly mainstream adult contemporary, soft rock sheen to them that are less attractive to me personally than these early singer-songwriter songs. At least Johnson played his hand right, veering into contemporary country in the mid-80s and becoming a bona fide country star with two number one hits, though like his colleagues he began to rely on outside songwriters rather than his own compositions. So, let's go back to the beginning instead...

There Is A Breeze is a bit of an odd duck of an album for reasons I will get into, but the highlights of the album are as high as any of his singer-songwriter colleagues of the time. So let's talk quickly about my three favorites from the album (besides "My Opening Farewell"). "Pilot Me" is an true opening statement, in more than one sense. It's open to interpretation, whether the entity the protagonist pleads to to pilot him through the obstacles in his path is a lover, or, you know, god, but it doesn't matter. It's a beautiful, impassioned plea for help and guidance that works both ways. But if I had to pick, I'd say the organ and flugelhorn arrangement points me toward the divine instead of the profane. Either way, it's a beautiful, stately song. 

"On The Road" is a lovely, bouncy memoir to younger, carefree times. "We didn't know who we were, we didn't know what we did, we were just on the road". It's essentially a children's song, as is the song that follows it on thjs version of There Is A Breeze, which means they hit something deeper. You might have just heard it, but you instantly feel like you've known this song for forever. The joyous chikldren's choir is a fantastic flourish. If you don't want to join in the chorus while, listening to this, I don't know what to tell ya. "Rooty Tooty Toot For The Moon", the next track, is rhythmically a lullaby for adults, somewhat like James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James". The chorus might be a big ol' pile of nonsense, but you'll not forget it and will catch yourself singing along to it right away: "Singin' rooty toot toot for the moon / it's the biggest star I've ever seen / It's a pearl of wisdom, a slice of green cheese / Burning just like kerosene, burning just like kerosene". Like "On The Road", you feel you've known this song forever, almost instantly. Total instant classic. 

For a debut album by the traditional acoustic singer-songwriter there is a nice amount of variety here: "In Your Eyes", definitely more wordly than "Pilot Me", is a nice little gallop that is led by country blues-y playing from fellow folkie Leo Kottke on bottleneck guitar, while "I Got You Covered", driven by bass and congas, is kind of jazzy. The title song uses cello and harp to, respectively, and alternatively foreboding and uplifting effect in what is ultimately as gloomy a relationship song, as, say, Browne's "Latye For The Sky"), while strings enhance the sad, elegiac "Old Folks", with its fatalistic reminder that "the old, old silver clock / that hangs on the wall / that waits for us all". There is of course a flipside to all these musical flourishes. With four different producers (including Peter Yarrown and Phil Ramone) laboring over the twelve songs , there is a bit of a 'everything but the kitchen sink' approach to proceedings, as if every producetr wanted to highlight a different side of Johnson. He himself felt that the debut album wasn't a true reflection of his music and opted for a more traditional acoustic guitar sound for the follow-up. 

But here's the thing: The 'more is more' approach that is applied here makes for listening that never gets into a 'nice, but sounds a little samey' quagmire that the guitar-based singer-songwriter album can sometimes fall into. Say what you will about There Is A Breeze, but it isn't boring. Especially in this slimmed down, all killer no filler version courtesy of good ol' OBG. Well, at least some of these experiments were too much or didn't work, which is why I reconfigured the album, with the old 'addition by substraction' logic. There were two okay-ish horn-driven numbers (a musical direction Johnson tellingly wouldn't follow up on), which I felt was one too many, so I only kept "See You Soon". 

But "Happier Days", the first jettisoned track wasn't an almost fatal mistake, like "Study In E Minor", a glacially paced dirge on acoustic guitar that is exactly what the title says. Except it doesn't go anywhere it hasn't been in the very first seconds, and takes a long time to get there. That track always stopped my enjoyment of There Is A Breeze dead in its tracks and made me hurry to the skip button, so skip it we will. Forever. Also tellingly, that this acoustic guitar tracks is the one produced by Johnson, so he might've felt that this was a true representation of him and his folksy roots. I'd also say if Johnson had delivered an album full of tracks in the "Study In E Minor" mold, I wouldn't be singing his praises here today. Lord knows (and my readership, too, if you've been here for a bit) that I love cohesive albums, but There Is A Breeze wouldn't be the sucess it is without some of the production flourishes. 

Sequencing, however, was another issue, with the album losing momentum a number of times, so I tried to maintain a number of songs in their original spots while improving the flow elsewhere. While shuffling the tracks around for this version of There Is A Breeze, I felt it was important to keep "Pilot Me" as the opener and the framing device of the original sequencing. Side one ended, as it does here, with "Rooty Toot Toot For The Moon", while side two was ended with a very different kind of lullaby: "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught", from the Rogers-Hammerstein musical South Pacific. Its uneasy, provocative take on racism and hatred passed on from generation to generation end There Is A Breeze on a slightly controversial note, allowing the album a moment of political comment. But it also reminds us of the rousing lullaby about that green cheese pearl of wisdom star, and how the lullabies we sing and the stories we tell our children will shape their, and our, lives. 

Michael Johnson got bigger, and the spotlight got brighter, but it is an open question whether he ever bettered There Is A Breeze. It is at least one of the too little known entries in the singer-songwriter canon, that deserves better than its almost total anonymity these days. Get in the breeze, open your ears and see if you'll agree...



Monday, July 14, 2025

Let's Talk About Dick...And By That I Mean Tracy Of Course.

Dick Tracy, the movie was a colossal miscalculation. When the public, spurned on by an unprecedented at the time marketing blitz, made Batman one of the top-grossing movies in 1989, the lesson was not to trot out 1930's era newspaper strip heores out of the moth balls and build wannabe blockbusters around them. The people who liked Batman wanted cool, moody comic book action, and instead in the following years got the pulp hero , newspaper-serial antics of Dick Tracy, The Phantom, The Rocketeer and The Shadow - none of 'em characters that would talk to a young or even semi-young person in 1990. If your target audience in 1990 were senior citizens, that strategy might make sense, but, uh, I'm not sure that was the idea, so most of these flopped pretty hard. Sure, Dick Tracy got the hype and made a ton of money (unlike those other three 'comic book movies'), but not like 'crazy money', and it didn't become a phenomenon like Batman a year before. 

Instead it will mainly be remembered as Warren Beatty's folly, a triumph of art direction, costumes and make up, but with an empty, hollow middle - one-dimensional characters in a one-dimensional, boring narrative. The crazy art direction and impressive costume and set design, as well as the elaborate latex make-up effects, and the idea to at least partly turn Dick Tracy into a musical - there are some bold and commendably crzy choices being made by director and star Warren Beatty - its was a bold swing, but a miss. Every time I watch the movie (which isn't often) I want to like it more than I do, and every time I lose interest once the unique setting and look has settled in. Dick Tracy is a bore. An expensive, elaborate, lovingly assembled bore, but a bore nonetheless. 

The maximalism and miscalculation on display in and with the film, also manifests in its peripherals. Like the music. Trying to be a carbon copy of the preceding year's blockbuster, the Dick Tracy filmmakers hired the very same composer to try and write a very familiar theme and score. There was an official soundtrack album, an exercise in overkill typical of early 90s CDs: a huge amount of bloat, notably by including a number of songs in several versions, despite none of those songs actually making it into the movie. And then of course, we needed a tie-in album from a big pop star, here obviously Beatty's paramour and film co-star Madonna.. If Prince gets to do an entire From And Inspired By' album for Batman, then goshdammit, Madonna will not settle for less. She won't get upstaged by that dwarf from Minnesota! 

And so we get the companion album I'm Breathless, which has a grand total of three songs that were featured in the movie and a nother batcch of 30's-era music pastiches (and, totally unrelated, top notch single "Vogue" attached at the end). So all in all you had to buy three Cds in 1990 for the full Monty Dick experience...and you'd still not get all the music played in the film. So, what about being more humble and condensing all this gigantism into one neat and tidy package, that could have come out in 1990 and might have beeen a better listen than the bloated, too-fat-too-float triple whammy that was proposed? Our One Buck Album will graciously try to fulfill that mission and bring you all you'll arguably need from the film in a tidy 42 minute (well, about 47 with the bonus tracks). 

That means some selections from Danny Elfman's score that is, well, an immediately identifiable Elfman score, whose "Main Title" tries hard to remind people of that other main title for that other comic book character, you know, the one who dresses up like a bat. You'd get the three Madonna songs from I'm Breathless, including "What Can You Lose", a duet with Mandy Patinkin. All of these mixed in with the songs from the soundtrack album that actually feature in the film, all of them more or less chronically arranged. That's what Dick Tracy - Motion Picture Soundtrack is. 

The musical director for the sound track was Andy Paley, once one half of teeniebopper-baiting power pop duo the Paley Brothers with, wait for it, his brother Jonathan. (who might show up on this blog, sooner or later). Afterwards he turned to producing, first turning heads with his work on Brian Wilson's self-titled debut solo album. Dick Tracy project was his biggest and most high-profile gig at the time. On top of producing and assembling the cast, Paley also wrote most of the songs in a faux-1930s style, though of course the big coup of the film's music department was getting Stephen Sondheim for the torch songs Madonna got to sing. Getting back to that cast for a second: There's some relative young guns here in k.d. lang and Erasure, but mostly Paley has assembled heroes and veterans like Brenda Lee, Jerry Lee Lewis and Al Jarreau. And it is fun hearing all of them croon their way through these faux-30s numbers. 

A word on the bonus tracks: These two are from the half dozen or so songs that weren't featured in the movie. LaVern Baker's "Slow Rollin' Mama" uses the old Blues trick of seemingly innocently talking about, in this case, rolling dough, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that she might not only talking about patisserie, if you know what I mean ("I need a big long rollin' pin, to get it ready and right, for my red hot oven"). Fabulously saucy stuff. Darlene Love's "Mr. Fix-It" is in the same pastiche mode as the ret of the tracks for the film, but is one of the best, so highly deserving of being included here, even if there's no trace of it in the film itself. 

And that is that. A single disc, 'has all you need' stop for a fun diversion, that in some ways is a better time than the movie itself. So check out Dick Tracy - Motion Picture Soundtrack (OBG edit) and see if you'll agree...

This is the first in a series of reworked soundtracks coming your way in the next months, often mixing songs and score for a more immersive film flashback experience...

Saturday, July 12, 2025

Seventies? Check! All Pearls? Check! No Swine? Check!...Yup, we're good here...

All Pearls, No Swine strike again! As they should! With new projects always taking precedent, I've been neglecting the blog's once flagship series a little bit...but like Bob Dylan's Neverending tour, ANPS will continue, at their own pace. Vol. 29 brings us back to the Seventies, once more, with a roster chock full of artists making their ANPS debut, plus one or two old friends.And if you rightfully think that those last weeks, the One Buck Guy hasn't really indulged much in his beloved country rock, oooh boy, All Pearls, No Swine 29 is going to change that...

All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 29 has indeed a ton of my beloved country rock/Americana, in different flavors and varieties. First there's  J.J. Light and his short trip to "Gallup, New Mexico", which turs a little psychedelic towards the end. Then The Oxpetals come "Down From The Mountain" and bring some tasty harmonies and organ playing with them. Poker Flatts go to a "Lake Of Fire", Comox And Friends hang out with (or are?) "Beautiful Losers", whileJoyous Noise add more than a bit of r'n'b and soul, if not outright funk, to "Funky Lady". APNS alumni Mark Jones brings the harrowing "Lion Trap", a bleak look at people going nowhere in a dead end job in a dead end ton that's bleak as hell and precedes the No Depression sound by fifteen years. Country Ward, not in APNS action since Vol. 6, bring an old-chool country weeper with the sentimental "Just Another Country Dream" while Chicago-era band Aliotta Haynes - named after their members, the Aliotta brothers Mitch and Ted, and guitar player Skip Haynes -  crank up the harmony-singing to eleven for ultra-lovely "Brother Sparrow". After Ted quit the band right after their debut album, they would add John Jeremiah on keyboards and continue as Alliotta, Haynes & Jeremiah.

Seriously, could these dudes look any more like the 70s?

Aslan have more of a folk sound which they bring to "Sonshine", as do City Freez with the lovely "City Talkin'", while Les Dudek's grovy "Cruisin' Groove" reminds you quite a bit of Little Feat's funkier numbers. Though a big influence on little brother Sweet Baby James, Alex Taylor never really made it as a recording artist, and is arguably only on third place in the Taylor brother hierarchy, after James and Livingston. Still, he was from time to time cranking out good stuff, slightly more rough-hewn than the softer voices of his two brothers, though still plenty smooth. 

You wouldn't expect a band from Fresno to be called Folly's Pool, and you definitely wouldn't think that they would mix their harmony-laden California folk-rock with a more than heavy sprinkle of U.K.-styled prog rock. Yet that's what they did, creating their version of folk-prog, as on the song that gave the band its name (or vice versa?).

If you didn't know any better, you'd say this is a '90s alternative rock album...

The ladies bring a bit of a different flavor to things. Mary Asquith's take on "Cocaine" has shades of Janis Joplin, while being distinctively British, befitting of Manchester's 'queen of blues and folk', whereas Dory Previn's brutal tale of "Mary C. Broown and The Hollywood Sign" uses music hall for its impressively bleak tale of Hollywood horrors. And then Bill Madison rides out All Pearls, No Swine 29's grooves with a tour on the prairies for "Buffalo Skinners", closing the circle and ending up where we started, with a piece of psychedelic Americana.  

Even though All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 29 is admittedly quite heavy on country rock/Americana numbers, the variety on display here should please the discerning APNS afficionado. 

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Slip Away On That Carefree Highway With Gordon Lightfoot

So, here comes part two of the huge Lightfoot retrospective I recently started. Disc Two of A Life In Song, this time covering most of Gordon's prime period, from 1971 to 1976. Same deal as the first disc: I'll run through the albums and from time to time explain why I picked the tracks I picked. Overall, Carefree Highway is probably the most consistently listenable of the three volumes, due to Gord widening his commercil and popular appeal and opening up his sound. Having three of his biggest smashes - "undown", "Carefree Highway" and "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald" on here - doesn't hurt either. So, let's check what's going on on this Carefree Highway, shall we? 

Don Quixote is the last album of Lightfoot as a tried-and-true folkie. Orchestrations or not, up until this album his songs were still esssentially acoustic folks songs. That would change withh the following album, when for the first time Lightfoot would employ a drummer, as well as upping the country instrumentation, notably making the pedal steel a fixed part of his instrumental repertoirse. Don Quixote is also one of Gord's best, a thoroughly enjoyable record without a weak track on it, which made picking songs for this comp difficult. The classic title song and his ode to the area of his childhood (and summer sailing trips) "Christian Island -Georgian Bay)" were obvious picks. I have always loved "Looking At The Rain", a classic Lightfoot ballad that was written around the time of the Sit Down Young Stranger/If You Could Read My Mind album a year before and sounds like it. Which leaves essentially one spot for another track. I'm sure many would vote for the jaunty "Alberta Bound" with Ry Cooder's mandolin playing, but my pick is "Brave Mountaineers", a song that summarizes what early Lightfoot was about. A lilting, memorable melody and chorus, uncluttered instrumentation, even some whistling during the outro - this song could have easily come from any of the albums preceding it, being a nice capper to that first phase of Lightfoot. 

Old Dan's Record is a conundrum in Lightfoot's discography, and especially in the context of the albums surrounding it. It is the great lost Lightfoot classic, an album long out of print and essentially forgotten. I knew it existed, thanks to the inclusion of the title track on Gord's Gold, but could never find it, so when Rhino issued it on CD for the first time in the early 2000's I had to get it just out of pure curiosity. And you know what? It's totally unfairly buried deep in his discography, as it's one of his best. It's also, as hinted above, a precursor of things to come, notably a more modern, radio-friednly sound. But what's relly striking about Old Dan's Records is the country influence. It's essentially Gord's country record, as you can easily see in the four picks of the album. I'd have more to say about it, but strongly consider posting the whole thing on here some day, so I'll just leave it at that, merely pointing out that "It's Worth Believin'" is one of my favorite Lightfoot songs and that "You Are What I Am" is a weirdly neglected charting single, never making any Greatest Hits package. 

And then of course Lightfoot hit it big with Sundown, the song and the album. "Sundown" the song is of course an improbable number one hit song - it has an amiable acoustic shuffle and a singalong chorus, which no doubt helped propel it to the top spot, but it's a very weird singalong - the lyrics are surprisingly dark, even menacing ("you better take care if I find you been creepin' 'round my back stairs"), ostensibly about Lightfoot's jealousy while in a relationship with groupie Cathy Smith - and the sweaty, nervy atmosphere Lightfoot evokes is almost unpleasant, yet couched in Gord's friendly, folk-pop sound it sounds like an upbeat song of some sort if you're not taking care what you are singing or humming along to. "Carefree Highway", the follow-up single, also became a top ten hit. Lightfoot's seafaring classic "High & Dry" has to be here, and the last selection from the album, "The Watchman's Gone" , is an underrated classic from the period and captures the wanderlust theme that underlies about half of the album. It has one of Lightfoot's most memorable melodies, yet has never been put on a compilation of any kind. Weirdly, Lightfoot only put a scant three selections from Sundown on his Songbook box set, essentially relegating his biggest seller to the status of a minor album. 

Lightfoot had all the career momentum in the world, so it was too bad that he couldn't really back it up with another quality batch of songs, as I would say that 1975's Cold On The Shoulder is one of his weaker efforts. Sounding fine while it plays, it simply isn't very memorable. "Rainy Day People" became an adult contemporary number one hit, based on Lightfoot's charts momentum, and I like the melody of "All The Lovely Ladies", even if the arrangement drifts a little too much into adult contemporary. The secret classic, or at least my secret classic, of the album is "The Soul Is The Rock", a more ambitious and epic song than most of its brethren. It is certainly odd, both in its possibly religious undertones ("live like a sheep, die like a lamb") and the weird allegories it uses. Slightly repetitive it might be, but it's hard to get the song's melody out of your head. 

After a decade of recording, Lightfoot compiled his first 'official' hits package, the double LP Gord's Gold, as United Artists had continued to throw 'Best Of's' of his five album-tenure there on the market, as soon as "If You Could Read My Mind" made him a star, and Warner/Reprise decided it was time to counter that. Rather than licensing songs from United Artists, Lightfoot took the package as a way to reinterpret and re-imagine his early recordings in his then recent folk-pop style, giving these songs fuller arrangements that the earlier, folkier work didn't have: drums, steel guitar, orchestration. Some purists might hate these remakes, but since this is essentially (at least for me) Lightfoot's signature sound, I love them and prefer a number of them to the originals. And that is why you get "For Lovin' Me" in the 1975 version, as well as the medley of "I'm Not Sayin'/Ribbon Of Darkness". And despite the song being featured on Vol. 1, you'll also get the 1975 remake of "Canadian Railroad Trilogy". It's an interesting case study in 'same but different'. Arrangement and lyrics are the same, but the song's slightly slower tempo, the addition of whining steel guitar and Lightfoot's by this time weathered voice give an entirely different feel to the song. While the original with its enthusiastic acoustic strumming and Lightfoot's youthful voice seemed to emphasize the pioneering spirit and wonder of achievement present in the song, the version from eight years later seems to emphasize the losses and loneliness of the endeavor, sommething the ever-touring, slididng into middle-age Lightfoot would know a thing or two about.  

While Cold On The Shoulder had been only so-so, Lightfoot struck back a year later with his last classic album, and one of his all-time best, Summertime Dream. Not only did it have his last big chart hit, and best story-telling song, "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald"  (already discussed at great lengths here). But a set of well-written songs and committed performances, for his most consistent album since, arguably, Don Quixote. There are, in fact, so many quality songs here - and I still had to drop antiwar song "Protocol" - that the Summertime Dream songs will spill over onto Vol. 3, but you get a trio of great songs: opener "Race Among The Ruins", a wonderful, weirdly underrated song, the album's sprightly title track, and of course "Edmund Fitzgerald" as the moody album closer. 

A Life In Song Vol. 2 - Carefree Highway covers Lightfoot's commercial zenith as a folk-pop crossover star, and it has a ton of classics that yiou should either add to your collection, or relisten to again. Whether you are a Lightfoot neophyte or afficionado, getting on that carefree highway to listen to some of the most beautiful music of the 1970s should in either case be your next destination...


 

 


Sunday, July 6, 2025

Bruce And The Promise Of The Forgotten Albums

It's not easy being a music fan invested in the Bruce Springsteen's music. Not because there are weird detours like his sould excursion Only The Strong Survive but because he is now entering a phase of his career where curating his work becomes more pressing for him, which means that there is more and more of all the famously discarded material now officially available, as made evident by The Promise chronciling all the songs recorded in the run-up to Darkness On The Edge Of Town or The Ties That Bind - The River Collection. Added to that there are the demos and other scraps that stay unoffcially unreleased and there is just so much music to go through. Famously prolific, it is said that for every album Springsteen does bring out, there is at least another (or an entirely different version of it) that stays in the vaults, and that is true. Sometimes, there is more than one. Sometimes there is more than two. Springsteen's vault of unreleased material literally has hundreds of unreleased songs in various states of composition and mastering.

Like every Springsteen fan, I'm dabbling in arranging and re-arranging this material, and the release of lat week's Tracks II boxset, including seven albums of material, is a good an excuse as any to get back into the alt Bruce business. Actually, the last dib into OBG versions of Bruce stuff, Don't Back Down, was due to the box set coming out, as I wanted to get my version out before the official one did last week. With that out of the way, we can now go back and settle into a more chronological approach, which means back to the mid-70s we go... 

The Promise, the album that is the One Buck Record of the day, largely but not exclusively draws from the compilation of the same name that covers songs Bruce recorded beteen 1976 and 1978 to create a companion piece to Darkness On The Edge Of Town. The idea was to make it a brighter, more optimistic companion, while not necessarily abandoning entirely Bruce's preoccupations and themes on Darkness. This isn't an all-out party or 'let's celebrate we're young' record, which are albums you possibly could have made out of the The Promise box set. No, this is an album that looks for balance, for some light in between the moments of doubt and darkness that you can still see and feel in the distance. I didn't want to go overbaord and create an anti-Darkness, but rather an album that feels like it could stand alongside that work while also being able to stand on its own as an album. 

So you get the optimistic opening punch of "Rendezvous" that clearly recalls Born To Run musically and lyrically ("we'll be riders,through all of the night") and was first issued by Greg Kihn in the late 70s, but also mood pieces like "The Preacher's Daughter", a Darkness outtake that is the only officially unrelesed song on here and on eof my faves of Bruce's stash of still unreleased songs. And there's the title cut, which lyrically would have fit like a glove on Darkness. Still, I realized that even though I didn't want to do another Darkness, I was inevitably drawn to the moodier, more serious songs rathar than Bruce's tribute-pastiches to Buddy Holly, The Animals or 60s girl groups, so The Promise did end up being a bunch of slower, moodier tunes anway, so I drafted in his version of "Because The Night" to make it a little more lively. 

I probably did it unconsciously, but the album seems itself to do the bridge between Born To Run and Darkness, having the numbers that sound most like Born To Run ("Rendezvoous", "Iceman","City Of Night on the first side, whilde side two gets moodier and more downbeat, even as Bruc's protagonist's try to hold on to notions of romance and optimism in "Hearts Of Stone" or "The Way". But even the song's protagonist's urging "Come On (Let's Go Tonight)" - the early version of Darkness' "Factory" -  has something desperate to it. They want to shed their troubles downton, but Elvis is dead, and there is nothing to do about 'em anyway. Fittingly for an album that starts with the promise of a "Rendezvous" and the ringing sounds of Born To Run, the album ends in a darkness on the edge of town, just down Thunder Road. During the long coda of "The Promise", Bruce's protagonists find themselves on Thunder Road once more, but the road, and its promises have irrevocably changed. Where in the original song, Thunder Road was the promise of an unknown, but surely better, future, this Thunder Road is a road to nowhere, a dead end street. 

The idea of my version of The Promise as to spotlight a number of absolute top notch Springsteen songs, that - scattered as they are on Tracks, The Promise and the vaults, don't necessarily get their due. Here, they make sense together, they give sense to each other, and they are appreciable as another, slightly sunnier path through the dark roads the boss was cruising and choosing in 1978. If the promise of The Promise is, to have a real album made of these things that the Boss couldn't or wouldn't quite fit together, then I not quite humbly say, promise fulfilled. What say you? 



Thursday, July 3, 2025

Count 'em. It's one...two...three...four..Roscoes!

Generally speaking, I'm not a huge fan of remixes. Often, they don't add much to the original. Or, conversely, they change so much, that the original is hardly recognizable anymore. However, sometimes, a remix can reveal a cool side of a song that you didn't see before. Such is the case with today's very short One Buck Record (more of a One Buck EP, actually). I stumbled upon these a little like I stumbled upon Midlake itself and their fantastic The Trials Of Van Occupanther., recently resequenced for a better listening experience.  As said on the write-up to taht post, the album was almost a total blind buy, other than a little blurb from a music store employee I believe, and possibly a song I heard on one of those music samplers that were popular with music magazines, in this case Rolling Stone. 

The song that might have been on that sampler, and the one that opens Trials and puts people under the spell of Midlake's strange alchemy? That would be "Roscoe", the song that gets put through the (remix) wrnger on this little offering. The song is perfect, in that it already brings everything the album will do to the table.It's also a weird little tune, as most on Trials are: "if I could change my name to something a little more productive like Roscoe". Say what? 

I don't feel like dancin', no, sir, no dancin' today...

The surprising thing about this song is how elastic it is. Before stumbling upon these remixes, I hadn't necessarily thought of "Roscoe" as a song you can dance to, yet these three variations bring out that part of the song, to various degrees. The 'Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Mix' that opens this EP emphasizes the song's dreamy side, while also retaining a dance-able rhythm. The 'Justin Robertson Remix goes full dance beat with 80s keyboard motifs, that the band probably would approve of, added to the mix. The 'Fading Soul Remix', while also maintaining a dance-able rhythm seems to put an emphasis on the melancholy side of the song. And to remind you how good the original is, I added a live version of the song to the end, if you want a purer "Roscoe" than the very dancehall-ready other three. 

But why would you? These are just way cooler than they have any right to be, which is why I wanted to share them with you. So, get ready to get to know Roscoe 1, Roscoe 2, Roscoe 3 and Roscoe 4. Groovy, baby!

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

All Pearls, No Swine Megapack Part Two

Yeah, yeah, more rummagging, with the first 90's-bound APNS racking up over 60 views AND NO DAMN REQUEST FOR A LINK. It's really easy, folks. Unless, you know, you'd just like to read stuff, which is fine also. 

So, as I've seen some other APNS-related activity for Volume 14 and 20, here's the same deal as last time. You get the megapack with volumes 11-20, I don't have to wander into half a dozen threads to upload. EVEN IF NO ONE ASKS FOR A DAMN LINK!

And then, as a way of saying 'hi' or 'thanks', you can leave a comment on whether you actually like the music you find herewithin...

Deal?

Deal!

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

The David Bowie Alt Album Super Duper Extra Bonus Package

Going along with the second volume of the We've Got You Covered series for all you Bowie-lovers out there and also because I realized some rummaging in Mr. Bowie's back catalogue, especially the Young Americans and 1. Outside alts, here's the simple package reupload deal for, I suppose, all those new visitors from Brazil (Olà!) and Vietnam (Xin chào!)...I don't know how y'all got here, but welcome! Now you just have to simply ask for a link instead of just going through the backlog in vain! 

Anyway, uncle OBG's got you, so here are in one tidy package all alt albums of Bowie that I've done: The OBG version of Never Let Me Down, 1. Outside sequel/side-quel  2.Downtown, and the whole plastic soul extravaganza of Young Americans - The Complete Edition and Shilling The Rubes. This summer I might get back into some Bowie work to go along with these, but to visitors, old and new, here's the Bowie megapackage if any of you need it...or want it...as usual there's tons of info in the accompanying write-ups. 


Update: Heureka! Some have (or one has?) seen how easy it is to ask for a link. Thanks, "unknown"! (Next step: sign with an nickname...any nickname). So, the Byrds alt album mega pack, this one, is now re-upped, as are the two Beach Boys alt albums and Alice Coper's Ruckus At The Movies. That should keep some of y'all occupied...

Monday, June 30, 2025

If you want more cool Bowie covers...well, we've got you covered...

Round two in our round-up of cool Bowie covers, and there's quite a number of 'em. Now, I wouldn't have bet that one of them would come from Dead Or Alive, who I only know as a slightly ridiculous-looking one hit-wonder with "You Spin Me 'Round (Lie A Record)". Then again, I wouldn't have figured that Culture Club would bring one of the highlights of Volume One in this We've Got You Covered series. The other unexpected and 80s-related joker in the pack is Midge Ure's cover of "Lady Stardust". 

The love of Brian Molko for Bowie (and Bowie's embracing of the band) are well-documented, his acoustic cover of "Five Years", done for French television, is still a really nice tribute. As for a less obvious fan, I wouldn't have figured Seal for a Bowie-fan, but his lovely unplugged take on "Quicksand", one of the lesser known Bowie classics, is a personal highlight of this set. Speaking of underrated songs that rarely get covered: Native American rock'n'rolller Stevie Salas covers Diamond Dogs-era obscurity "Dodo". "Little Wonder", from Bowie's little-loved Earthling drum'n'bass album is also a little on the obscure side, Run Toto Run's cover is a lovely, decidedly less noisy reading of the tune. "In The Heat Of The Morning" is one of Bowie's realatively unknown numbers from the pre-stardom Decca era and gets a fabulous reading from The Last Shadow Puppets. Another lost gem from that same era is "The Gospel According To Tony Day", covered exquisitely here by Edwyn Collins. 

The other possibility is of course to take a known number, but give it an unusual new coat of paint. That happens when bluegrass combo Cornbread Red cover "Under Pressure", while also unwittingly launching me down the Pickin' On...rabbithole. Unusual is also the word for the cover of "Ziggy Stardust", not so much because it's an acoustic unplugged version, but because it's done by the decidedly un-acoustic Def Leppard in the middle of a rowdy pub audience! And also unusual: Choir!Choir!Choir! and David Byrne, helped out by a ton of bystanders, making a huge sing-alone cover of "Heroes"! Covers from, among others, Fury In The Slaughterhouse and Hugh Coltman, are close to the originals and more workman-like, but still very fine additions to the series, bringing in some as-of-yet not covered songs to this second volume. 

And that's it. Eighteen high quality covers covering the spectrum of Bowie's music. Nothing more, nothing less. Yup, we've got you well covered again, David.  


Edit: I mislabeled an artist on the comp. It's Cornbread Red, not Iron Horse who cover "Under Pressure". I've changed the tagging in the new donloadable version. 


Friday, June 27, 2025

It's A Green Day...on Blue, Blue Grass...

The first compilation of the secret stash of goodies that was, unexpectedly, the Pickin On... series that I stumbled on by accident, was a pretty safe bet. It was, as a reader pointed out, a lovely compilation, but Neil Young and bluegrass were inherently very compatible, seeing how uncle Neil is in acoustic, country-ish mode half of the time, anyway and Tim Smith & Friends wisely picked from albums that emphasized that style, even though I would love to get "Trans" as a bluegrass album, but that's another story entirely. But yeah, Neil Young covered in bluegrass was a relatively safe pick, whereas this - our One Buck album of the day - is...a little less so. 

I don''t know how many of you are Green Day fans. Me, I'm not some crazy superfan but like most of their stuff. Billie Joe is truly underrated as a songwriter (but I'll get to that a little later on) and Tré Cool is one of my favorite drummers. Green Day's best songs are melodic, catchy, and kick some serious ass. They are also pretty much perfect for a bluegrass treatment: they are quick, they have hooks, and they are done in a straightforwad style (i.e. the famous four chords you need). Bluegrass adaptations do not necessarily work on, say, elaborate prog rock compositions, but punk rock? *Chef's kiss*

These versions really show what a great pop songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong is and always was. Sometimes you had the feeling he just had to squeeze some bad words in there to uphold appearances, because at heart he is a pop writer, whose pop just happens to be harder and quicker than a lot of other people's. Now this would be all fine and dandy, but still wouldn't amount to much if the Pickin On... folks had turned these songs into the 'Bluegrass muzak' a reader feared. 

Thankfully, by the time they got around to taking care of Green Day, the powers that be pickin' had turned to full-fledged modern bluegrass outfits and given them reign to arrange and play these songs like they felt. It also helped that the three bands responsible for the Green Day covers here are three of the best in the Pickin On... stable. They all bring something slightly different to the table. Cornbread Red, Honeywagon and The Sidekicks are real bands instead of studio players drafted together, and you can feel that in these songs and arrangements.

It will of course never not be funny to hear a bluegrass player drawl "Well, maybe I'm a faggot American, I ain't part of the red neck agenda". Especially considering that Green Day's (in)famous 'protest album' American Idiot, which is richly presented here, wasn't so much a reaction to George Bush the younger -era politics, though that shoe fit supremely well, but a reaction from Billie Joe Armstrong to seeing band and fans at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. 

This collection really reminds you how great these tunes are. So, whether you like Green Day, you like Bluegrass, or you just like some damn good pickin', A Green Day On Blue Grass is for you... 

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Ruckus From The Movies: Come And Dance With The Dead, Baby!

Time to revive another series gone dormant. In this case, the long break was almost normal, as I had planned out the first three volumes, but nothing beyond that. So, with this fourth volume, we go in a bit of a different direction. After having featured three veteran hard rock acts, Dance With The Dead are a different proposition. About three years ago or so I had a little summer fling with the music subgenre they call synthwave. And I stumbled onto Tony Kim and Justin Pointer a.k.a. Dance With The Dead. These two childhood friends love two thing: 80s music and horror movies. From these two loves was born Dance With The Dead, whose original songs are mainly horror-themes pastiches of mid-80s synth and AOR rock, with a dash of heavy metal, including big synth riffs (usually by Pointer) and even bigger guitar riffs (usually by Kim). Their proper compositions are fn, if sometimes a little redundant, but they would occasionally remix known rock songs and film themes. Remixing is almost an understantement, as they would add tons of additional instrumentation.  

For this volume of Ruckus At The Movies, the focus of the compilation has changed a tiny bit, from songs that were featured in movies to (note the subtle title change) songs that come from movie soundtracks or were used in movies . John Carpenter's theme from "Assault On Precinct 13" and Carles Bernstein's theme from "a Nightmare On Elm Street" are total classics and so close to what the synthwave sound wants to capture (especially Carpenter's synth scores, obviously), that Dance With The Dead's re-imaginings don't have to go very far. And yet they do, as Kim adds some monster guitar solos that obviously aren't in the originals. 

Maybe these weirdos loving another weirdo explains their cover of Lindsey Buckingham's "Holiday Road", that was written for National Lampoon's Holiday. Then we have a cover of Luniz' hip hop classic "I Got 5 On It", that was used so effectively to spooky effect in Jordan Peele's Us. Now, while Us wasn't perfect - and neither were Get Out or Nope - it sure was a big, bold swing and in today's almost entirely I.P.-driven climate in Hollywood that is an achievement by itself. "Paint It Black" has of course been used in more than half a dozen movies, scoring the end credits of Full Metal Jacket and The Devil's Advocate and most recently featured in The Rock's flop comic book adaptation Black Adam. And finally, these two synthwave pranksters end proceedings with their take on the Theme from Gremlins

So, in order to appreciate today's modest One Buck Record - more of an Ep than a full-length album - you would need to have an appreciation for big chunky'n'cheesy 80s production. If you do, I guarantee a good time with some Ruckus At From The Movies...


Saturday, June 21, 2025

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. 



Thursday, June 19, 2025

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...

Bluegrass Chartbusters Ahead! Yeehaw and Hotdiggity!

If you have followed this blog for a bit, you already know that, when not listening to folks giving it a neo-traditional spin , I like my bl...