Every once in a while a song just grabs you on the radio. It used to happen a lot more often than it does now, but that makes it all the more extraordinary when it does happen today.
"Hold On" by Alabama Shakes grabbed me a few days ago when I was driving to the train station. It's an unstoppable slab of post-millenial white man's blues in the tradition of the White Stripes or My Morning Jacket -- or so I thought until I saw this video.
The singer is not a white man appropriating a Jagger-esque falsetto, but a woman of color from from Athens, Alabama named Brittany Howard. And she is the real thing.
Alabama Shakes are opening for the great Jack White on his inaugural solo tour this spring. And they have a new full-length record called Boys & Girls coming out on April 10th, which you can pre-order here.
In the meantime, you can "Hold On" by Alabama Shakes for a mere 69 cents right now on iTunes here.
After a multi-year hiatus from releasing new material, our hero BeckHansen is back with a fabulous new song called "Looking for a Sign," which appears on the soundtrack to the new comedy Jeff Who Lives at Home, starring Jason Segel, Ed Helms and Susan Sarandon. (You can see the trailer here.)
"Looking for a Sign" is a lovely tune which finds Beck in his Sea Change acoustic singer-songwriter mode, which is quite possibly my favorite Beck mode. Other Beck modes include satirical Gen-X slacker, white rapper, Mississippi Delta Blues appropriator, post-psychedelic visionary, junkyard curator and seemingly sane Scientologist.
Beck's last album, the Danger Mouse-produced Modern Guilt, came out in 2008. Beck has kept himself busy over the past few years producing records for fellow aging alt-slackers Stephen Malkmus Charlotte Gansbourg and Thurston Moore. He also does Beck's record club where he and fellow muicians recreate classic albums from The Velvet Underground and Nico to Yanni's Live at the Acropolis. It's an idea more interesting in theory than execution, but well worth checking out here.
Beck is playing some rock festivals this summer, including the Governor's Ballin New York City this June, so let's hope this new activity is signs of a full-length LP. Until we know for sure, let's go out with my favorite song from Modern Guilt, "Gamma Ray," performed live on Letterman.
Congrats go out to Mr. Bob Dylan, who released his self-titled debut LP 50 years ago today, a fact more mind-blowing than the lyrics to "Visions of Johanna."
Dylan's first record, on Columbia Records, where he still resides, was mostly traditional folk and blues covers. But they were well chosen and delivered with what many have noted is a punk-like ferocity, which was completely against the white-bread grain of folk and popular music of the era.
Several of these songs have enjoyed long lives after being brought to the public's attention by Dylan's debut, which was a flop at the time but has understandably gained in stature as Dylan's genius matured.
One of these tunes is "Man of Constant Sorrow," a tune which has been covered almost as many times as well, a Dylan tune. Most recently, it was featured heavily in the Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou? Here's Bob doing a truly wonderful version back in 1963 or so.
Another one was "House of the Rising Sun," a public-domain song whose arrangement Dylan stole from fellow folkie and mentor Dave Van Ronk right before Van Ronk was about to record his own debut record. A few years later, The Animals did what many would say is the definitive version of the tune.
After the release of his eponymous debut, our hard-working hero went straight to work on his second LP, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, a true work of genius which contained "Blowin' in the Wind," "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" "Girl from the North Country," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Masters of War," among others.
Nothing would ever be the same — for Bob, for The Beatles, who immediately grasped that Bob was pointing the way, or for any of us.
Bob has never really let up, releasing somewhere around 45 albums of new material, plus about 10 LPs of previously unreleased outtakes and another 10 LPs or so of live shows, and maybe another 10 best-ofs. And there's still plenty left in them there vaults.
Nothing goes better with a Guinness or a Jamesons than a little Clancy Brothers. Make that a whole lot of Clancy Brothers. Their Irish Drinking Songs compilation is tailor made for St. Paddy's Day and is the ideal party favor for your favorite booze-swilling leprechaun.
Andy as you can see from the photo at left, the boys really know how to rock a turtleneck.
The Clancy Brothers & the Dubliners, "Beer, Beer, Beer"
The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, "Whiskey, You're the Devil"
Buy Irish Drinking Songs by the Clancy Brothers' & the Dubliners on iTunes here.
One of those dubious holidays that's been gaining traction in the public consciousness lately is Pi Day, March 14, which is 3.14 if you spell it out that way. It's a tribute to what Wikipedia calls the "mathematical constant that is the ratio of any Euclidian circle's circumference to its diameter." You don't have to be Einstein to realize the implications this number will have in the worlds of engineering and stuff.
Speaking of Einstein, 3.14 is also Albert Einstein's 133rd birthday. so today is basically National Science Day, which leads to today's musical selection, Thomas Dolby's 1983 hit "She Blinded Me With Science."
This song is apropos not only because it has the word "science" in its title but because it sounds like it was performed by a mad scientist. Thomas Dolby was a synthesizer wizard and innovative producer wasn't too far from one. It was one of the first big MTV video hits, due in part to its cheeky video.
Get Thomas Dolby's Blinded by Science on iTuneshere.
Davy
Jones’ corpse hasn’t even left the rigor mortis stage and already Rock
Turtleneck is back with another Monkees tribute. Today is the birthday
of Mickey Dolenz who is 67 and by almost all accounts alive.
As
I said in last week's Davy Jones homage, Dolenz sang pretty much every great
Monkees tune except for “Daydream Believer.”
One of his best is
“Mary, Mary” a Mike Nesmith composition from their second album More of
the Monkees, a record I played to death when I was around 7. The album
topped the Billboard chart for 18 weeks in 1967, pretty amazing when you
consider all the great music coming out at the time.
"Mary,
Mary" has an infectious beat, which is probably why in 1988, the hip-hop trailblazers Run-DMC
sampled it for their own song called “Mary, Mary.” They changed the lyrics from
"Mary, Mary/Where you goin' to?" to "Mary, Mary/why you buggin’?" - not sure if
that’s any better, worse or really any different. But it’s a fun song nonetheless.
Run-DMC's version of "Mary, Mary" appeared in their film Tougher than Leather, which pulled a
rare “clean sweep” of all five major categories at the 1989 Academy
Awards.
Our hard-working hero Jack White III kicked off his solo career over the weekend with a typically amazing performance on Saturday Night Live hosted by the heavily botoxed, seemingly sober Lindsay Lohan.
The first tune he did was “Love Interruption,” a Memphis-style soul ballad with electric piano reminiscent of Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man,”featuring vocal assist from Ruby Amanfu (seen above).
Jack came back later in the show with a different backup band and justified sitting through 45 minutes of lame skits to play the wonderfully titled tune “Sixteen Saltines” a blistering tune in the Raconteurs tradition, if there is such a thing.
White’s first solo album Blunderbuss comes out on April 24 in the US and promises to be one of the most interesting releases of the year.
I assumed “blunderbuss” was a made-up word but then I looked it up on Mirriam-Webster and learned it has at least two meanings:
A muzzle-loading firearm with a short barrel and flaring muzzle to facilitate loading
A person who moves unsteadily or confusedly, or makes a mistake through stupidity, ignorance, or carelessness
With three successful bands behind him and guitar legend status firmly in place, Jack White is roughly at the point in his career that Eric Clapton was at the release of his 1970 debut solo LP, the cleverly titled Eric Clapton, which spawned the hits “After Midnight” and the bland but catchy “Let it Rain.” Let’s hope White strays from the solo-career template laid down by Slowhand, who descended into heroin addiction soon after going solo and, after cleaning up, released an equally nightmarish string of overproduced records in the 80s like "Bad Love," his collaboration with Phil Collins which features the haunting couplet "I've had enough/Bad love" - sounds like E.C. needed a love interruption.
Buy Jack White's "Love Interruption" on iTuneshere. Get Eric Clapton's self-titled debut here.
Back in the day, The Monkees were known as the "Pre-Fab Four," a corporate creation designed to rip
off the musical stylings and personal chemistry of The Beatles.
Peter
Tork took the Ringo/buffoon role. Mike Nesmith was George, the quiet one
who always tried to get his songs on the albums. Mickey Dolenz was John , with the sharp wit and urgent voice. And Davy Jones, who died of
a heart attack yesterday at 66, was Paul, the cute one with the sweet
voice. (Of course none of these caricatures were really so cut and dry.)
Nevertheless, The Monkees had music's greatest songwriters and studio musicians at their disposal, and created some of the best pop songs of the 60s. R.E.M. often cited
them as an early inspiration; early bootlegs from Athens feature their
cover of “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone.”
In
general, my favorite Monkees tracks tended to be sung by Dolenz rather
than Jones. But one thing Davy did have that not even The Beatles could
claim was that funny way of dancing whlist sashaying — an early, more
innocent version of the serpentine slither Axl Rose did in Guns ‘n’
Roses.
I had a couple of friends in college who put some serious time
into getting that Davy Jones dance down, but they could never quite nail
it.
The
Davy Jones shuffle: Oft-imimated, never duplicated. Here it is starting
at around 1:10 in his most famous song “Daydream Believer,” a song
that’s pretty much impossible to not love.
Let's send Davy out with a lesser known Jones/Monkees classic: “Valleri,” a tune
which seems to have a decided Buffalo Springfield influence.
R.I.P. Davy Jones. Get more Monkees on iTuneshere.
Congrats go out to Mr. Bob Dylan, who released his self-titled debut LP 50 years ago today, a fact more mind-blowing than the lyrics to "Visions of Johanna."
Peter
Tork took the Ringo/buffoon role. Mike Nesmith was George, the quiet one
who always tried to get his songs on the albums. Mickey Dolenz was John , with the sharp wit and urgent voice. And Davy Jones, who died of
a heart attack yesterday at 66, was Paul, the cute one with the sweet
voice. (Of course none of these caricatures were really so cut and dry.)
I had a couple of friends in college who put some serious time
into getting that Davy Jones dance down, but they could never quite nail
it. 
