Steven Tyler turned 60 last year. That’s like 140 in rock star years. But it occurs to me that Aerosmith, or at least their management and marketing teams, have done a fantastic job of remaining relevant and hip to younger generations.
They are like the wizened old newspaper reporter who starts a blog and shoots and edits his own video while colleagues half his age complain about having to post stories to the Web. Proof positive that age is just a number.
When ‘Back on the Chain Gang’ came on the radio the other day, my wife said “I hate The Pretenders but I love this song.”
I found that a funny and bizarre statement but it made perfect sense coming from her. She forms strong opinions quickly and a little contradiction like that is hardly enough to derail her. I’m a lot more tortured when it comes to matters of taste, so if I found myself loving a song by a group I hated, I’d start to question whether I could really hate the group, or really love the song. Maybe I’m the bizarre one.
Then I started wondering if there are any songs about which I could say the same thing.
I’d never heard of Laura Nyro until about a year ago. She’s another of those influential and mega-talented artists who faded into obscurity because they never achieved much commercial popularity. Some of her songs were big hits, but always for other people.
It seems Nyro was something of a savant when it came to songwriting. She was just 20 years old when she released Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, the groundbreaking album that features this song. She leaped between keys and time signatures within her songs in a way not done very often before or since.
My first exposure to Sinead O’Connor came from her huge hit I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, which had its heavier moments but was mostly a collection of ballads.
She was clearly a songwriter and singer to be reckoned with based on that album alone, but it wasn’t until I got her debut album The Lion and the Cobra that I realized exactly how special a talent she was.
I wrote yesterday about the use of songs in movies and TV shows, and today’s song is a splendid example. Though I bought Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing album when it first came out and knew it pretty well, I will always associate ‘Full of Grace’ with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The Buffy fans out there already know what I’m talking about. At the end of Season Two (possibly the best season of television’s best show) Buffy is forced to kill Angel, the vampire she loves. She then boards a bus and leaves Sunnydale without saying a word to her friends or mother, and this is the song that plays over the final montage.
Meet Me In Montauk 