Today’s Random Weekend selection is the best-known song from one of the best albums of the 90s, Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. This is a bonus track, a piano and vocals version of lead single ‘Possession.’ It strips away the glorious production of the original but is no less powerful. Maybe more so.
McLachlan wrote this song in the voice of an obsessed fan, something she unfortunately had plenty of back in the day.
Today’s Random Weekend selection marks the sixth time a song from the Amores Perros soundtrack has been featured on the blog. Three of the other five were also Random Weekend picks. Guess the Random iTunes Fairy has a thing for Mexican films.
Amores Perros remains my favorite Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film, even after the man won back-to-back Best Director Oscars for Birdman and The Revenant. Amores Perros was his feature length debut and in my opinion he never topped it.
A few weeks after Billy Joel won the Montauk Madness competition, the Randon iTunes Fairy has served up a song aimed at making all of us regret that outcome.
Billy Joel has written and recorded dozens of excellent songs and a handful of real stinkers. ‘This is the Time,’ from 1986’s otherwise fine album The Bridge, might be the stinkiest.
I’ve praised Bob Dylan’s recent albums of standards originally performed by Frank Sinatra, though my readers generally aren’t as impressed. Today’s song comes from Dylan’s second such album, 2016’s Fallen Angels.
This time around, I’ll let professional music critics do the heavy lifting. Here are a few quotes compiled on the album’s Wikipedia page.
Ah, the summer of 1995. I was working as a production assistant at a video studio in Boca Raton and befriended a couple of hip employees who introduced me to Garbage’s debut album.
They were hard rock types, and this album was a little harder than I normally go for, but I fell for it entirely anyway. Credit goes to the sexy, Scottish Shirley Manson, with whom I remain smitten to this day.
Who but Randy Newman can deliver both laugh out loud funny and hauntingly sad songs with the same finesse?
Today’s SOTD, ‘Same Girl,’ from Newman’s 1983 album Trouble in Paradise, is a somber declaration of love from a pimp to one of his prostitutes. Another thing I love about Newman… he writes songs about things very few artists would ever consider.
John Hiatt is a singer-songwriter worthy of more attention than I’ve ever given him. I own a couple of his albums and know some of his most famous songs (Bonnie Raitt’s ‘Thing Called Love,’ ‘Have a Little Faith’). But I haven’t listened to him, not really.
2000’s Crossing Muddy Waters is one of the Hiatt albums I own. It’s a stripped-down acoustic record of mostly heartbreak songs and though I can’t remember the last time I listened to it (probably the year it came out), sampling its tracks just now I didn’t come across a weak one.
