The second segment of the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is titled ‘Near Algodones’ and stars James Franco as an outlaw cowboy who can’t win for losing.
This segment is a lot less cartoonish than the opener but it’s the second most comical of the six. The Coens ease viewers into the darkness, which hits with a wallop in the next chapter.
We’re getting close to year’s end, and I have a host of movies left to see that have a shot at cracking my top ten.
Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma leads the pack, followed by (in no particular order) Vice, Mary Poppins Returns, If Beale Street Could Talk, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Favourite and Widows. Plus a host of movies from earlier in the year I need to catch up with at home: Hearts Beat Loud, The Rider, The Oath and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, to name a few.
Here’s a lovely track from Elvis Costello’s 2004 album The Delivery Man, which started as a concept album about a quartet of characters in the deep south but ended up as a collection of loosely connected rock songs and ballads.
Ivy was presumably one of the characters in that original narrative, and her presence is felt in the backing vocals of the wonderful Emmylou Harris, who shows up on a couple of tracks. Lucinda Williams sits in on the raucous ‘There’s a Story in Your Voice,’ delivering a wild and passionate performance.
I was shocked to discover that I’ve posted 3,808 Songs of the Day without once featuring a song from R.E.M.’s 1987 album Dead Letter Office.
This collection of B-sides, outtakes and loose ends was released between 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant and 1987’s Document, which made an appearance on Random Weekends exactly one week ago.
Genesis is a fascinating band, one of the few to fundamentally change musical styles (and singers) over decades while continuing to grow its audience.
They started as a folk rock band fronted by Peter Gabriel, then shifted to prog rock after Phil Collins joined as drummer and background vocalist. When Gabriel left the band in 1978 and Collins took over as lead singer, they started a gradual shift toward pop. That’s where they would ultimately find the most success, reaching their commercial pinnacle with 1986’s excellent Invisible Touch.
I’m passingly familiar with the next featured 1981 album, Foreigner’s 4. I bought it for $5 a couple of years ago because it seemed like an album I should own.
4 was, appropriately, the rock band’s fourth album. I was going to write that it was by far their most successful, but a quick check revealed that, while this album sold 6 million copies and spent 10 weeks in Billboard’s #1 spot, their 1978 album Double Vision actually outsold it by a million.
Stevie Nicks had already enjoyed extraordinary success with Fleetwood Mac when she released her solo debut, Bella Donna, in 1981.
Nicks was on a hell of a roll at this point in her career. She joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975 (along with her writing and life partner Lindsay Buckingham) and anchored the band’s two most popular and acclaimed albums, including 1977’s Rumours, one of the top-selling albums of all-time.
