A couple of days after yesterday’s performance, My Morning Jacket played a New Year’s Eve show in Boston and delivered this splendid cover of Elton John’s classic ‘Rocket Man.’
According to setlist.fm, Elton John is MMJ’s ninth most covered artist. They’ve played ‘Rocket Man’ 16 times between 2000 and 2016.
When I happened upon yesterday’s My Morning Jacket version of John Denver’s ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane,’ I wound up crawling down a rabbit hole of other cover songs by the band.
While the band is lauded for its original songs, they clearly derive a lot of pleasure from playing the songs of others, particularly in their live shows. I’ll spend the rest of this week featuring a few of those performances.
Good news for those of you waiting with bated breath for the results of my ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ poll — today a victor will be crowned!
You’ll also get to (or be forced to, depending on your perspective) hear one more rendition of the song. This one is by My Morning Jacket, from The Music is You: A Tribute to John Denver, an album of covers released in 2013.
U2’s latest album, Songs of Experience, debuted at #1, giving the band #1 hits in every decade since the 80s (they are the first band to achieve that milestone). Many of those sales were the result of a deal that packaged a copy of the album with tickets to their current tour, a gimmick many acts are adopting to boost album sales.
As gimmicks go, it’s not as audacious as the one they tried with their previous album, 2014’s Songs on Innocence, when they automatically uploaded copies of the album to every iTunes customer in the world. That didn’t go over so well.
It’s been almost nine months since Tom Petty died of cardiac arrest brought on by an accidental drug overdose.
One of the drugs, fentanyl, also contributed to the deaths of Prince and Lil Peep. This is certainly the only context in which Lil Peep’s name will ever be mentioned alongside those legends.
Meet Me In Montauk 