Today’s Random Weekend selection is making up for a past sin.
When I spent a three weeks last year walking through Bruce Springsteen’s discography an album at a time, I skipped one in order to fit the series into the allotted time frame. That album was We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen’s 2006 collection of classic folk songs.
Today, that record gets its due.
My first random selection this weekend is the title track from Fiona Apple’s third (and most recent) album, Extraordinary Machine.
It’s been seven years since this album was released and Apple’s fans are still waiting on new material. This woman certainly can’t be accused of flooding the marketplace. According to a recent tweet by Epic Records CEO L.A. Reid, a new Fiona Apple album is due sometime this year. But I’ll believe that when I see it.
I’ve come across several dozen covers of ‘Make You Feel My Love’ from Bob Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind, but just about every one of them is described as an Adele cover.
No doubt many, if not most, of those singers believe Adele wrote the song. It’s not as if her version is different from Dylan’s (apart from the vocals, of course) so that covering Adele’s version is somehow different from covering Dylan’s. She was faithful to the original.
The young woman singing in this clip appears to be the driving force behind the shoombabies YouTube channel. She sometimes performs solo, both with and without a guitar, but often is joined by a wide range of accompanying musicians.
In this case, the girl playing guitar isn’t identified and isn’t all that great a guitar player (or at least, her guitar doesn’t sound all that great to me… but maybe that’s more of a tuning issue). And I find that adds to the appeal of the clip.
“My music taste is like most people’s dads,” is how maybesotory introduces herself on her YouTube page, and that hits on the key ingredient of her immense appeal.
Tory is a porcelain-lovely English lass with bee-stung lips and a wide assortment of hairstyles (though she tends to favor the bangs she sports in this clip). Her song selections are solidly 60s: Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and a whole lot of Bob Dylan. As she comments on one of her clips, she feels she was born in the wrong decade.
