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.
I last featured a Black Keys song in late January. Like this one, it was a ‘Random Weekend’ selection from the 2011 album El Camino.
I feel about today’s song exactly how I felt about that one, so I will reiterate what I said then:
Sometimes a Random iTunes Weekend selection pops up and I just got nothing. No feelings about the band or the song one way or the other. No anecdote about how the selection made it to my music library in the first place. Nothing.
Such is the case with today’s SOTD, ‘Mind Eraser’ by The Black Keys. Fine song, reminiscent of every other Black Keys song I’ve heard, but that’s it.
Meet Me In Montauk 