Lucinda Williams has released a dozen albums during her 38-year career, four in the first 18 years and eight in the last 20. She stepped up the pace after 1998’s Car Wheels On a Gravel Road (still her best album), releasing a record about once every other year.
My guess is that if 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone had come after a lengthy hiatus, rather than during the relatively productive streak Williams was on at the time, it would have been received with more critical fanfare.
When George Martin and his son Giles were tasked with crafting the soundtrack to The Beatles’ Cirque Du Soleil show, LOVE, they must have lit up like kids in a candy shop.
The producers had free rein to cull recordings from the entire Beatles catalog, both released and unreleased, and twist it all together into something new. The result is a brilliant mash-up of familiar songs made fresh, and an eye-popping performance I was luck enough to see performed in Las Vegas this past summer.
Today’s Random Weekend track comes from Sarah McLachlan’s lackluster 2010 album Laws of Illusion. Released seven years after the decent Afterglow, this album failed to meet mounting expectations.
It was especially disappointing because this was McLachlan’s first work following the dissolution of her marriage, and I love me a good heartbreak album. Instead, we got a boring one.
Today’s Random Weekend selection had twice the chance of showing up because I have it on two different albums. Originally released as the final track of U2’s 1993 album Zooropa, it was later selected for Johnny Cash’s compilation album The Legend of Johnny Cash.
It’s the Cash album version that popped up when I spun the old iTunes wheel, but the two are identical (save for a minute of silence tacked on to the end of the U2 track).
My appreciation of country music doesn’t extend to the generic country pop featured on Carrie Underwood’s 2005 debut album, Some Hearts. I like the harder-edged sound of hit single ‘Before He Cheats’ well enough, but something like today’s Random Weekend SOTD leaves me cold.
That said, I do think this song has merit lyrically. It depicts the relationship between a young woman about to head off to college and the small town man she’s leaving behind.
Meet Me In Montauk 