Back in the early weeks of the Song of the Day series, I did a theme week on duets. I wrapped up with Mark Knopfler and James Taylor singing the title song of Knopfler’s Sailing to Philadelphia.
Nearly a thousand songs later, I’m doing another week of duets, and I’m kicking it off with a track from the same album.
This time it’s Van Morrison joining Knopfler on ‘The Last Laugh,’ another stellar song from one of the most underrated albums of the 2000s.
I’ve been lucky enough to see Elvis Costello in concert four times. Every one of the shows was simply amazing.
The first was on Halloween night, 1999, in Sunrise, Florida, and like the SOTD’s from yesterday and today, it featured just Costello on guitar and Steve Nieve on piano. The 39-song (!) set list is posted here and I believe it might have been submitted to that site by my cousin (though certainly there were other “Heathers” who attended the show).
Song #39 on that list, ‘Couldn’t Call it Unexpected No. 4,’ was delivered “off mic” by Costello in one of the most intimate moments I’ve ever witnessed at a live concert. He was about ten feet away, belting out the song with no accompaniment.
In 1996, Elvis Costello toured in support of his All This Useless Beauty album with a series of low-key shows featuring just him on acoustic guitar and his longtime keyboardist Steve Nieve on piano.
The same year, Costello released a limited edition box set compiling performances from five nights of that tour. Each 5- or 6-track CD contained recordings from one U.S. city: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and New York. It wasn’t the most fan-friendly packaging (each CD runs a little more than 20 minutes, meaning the whole thing could have fit on one or two discs) but it was a special collection.
AllMusic.com gives the highest 5-star rating to nine Rolling Stones albums, including the five I’m featuring this week. Two of those are their early covers albums, ranked so high apparently more for the ground they broke for the band than the actual content. Another is 1978’s Some Girls, a return to form for the band and, according to these reviewers, the last truly great thing produced by the band.
Another is Sticky Fingers, the 1971 record that followed up Let It Bleed. I have long wanted to own Sticky Fingers and I’m not really sure why I haven’t just bought it along the way. ‘Brown Sugar‘ and ‘Wild Horses‘ are its best-known tracks, and I like them both quite a bit, and it features other much heralded but new to me tracks such as ‘Sister Morphine‘ and ‘Moonlight Mile.’
Another year, another classic. In 1969, The Rolling Stones released Let It Bleed and kept up their crazy streak. I’m always amazed to see the consistent output of excellence year after year in the 60s by artists such as The Stones, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. It must have been amazing to be alive at that time and experience all of these albums one after another in real time.
If Let It Bleed consisted of nothing but its first and last tracks, it would still be an album for the ages. As it is, the stuff in between is damn good in its own right (particularly the title song and ‘You Got the Silver,’ which features Keith Richards on lead vocals). But it’s all about the bookends.
