I’ve always ranked The Beatles’ Let It Be in the lower half of their albums. That’s not saying too much, given the excellence of everything they released, but still, it’s never been a favorite.
I found a whole new appreciation for the album, however, after watching Peter Jackson’s Get Back mini-series, which documented the creation of Let It Be in fascinating detail. Now when I listen to it, I can picture the laughs, the fights, the creative chemistry that made The Beatles work.
Today’s random selection comes from an EP that accompanied Lyle Lovett’s 2009 album Natural Forces. That album was half made up of Lovett’s covers of other Texas songwriters, and the EP — titled T For Texas, T From Tennessee — offered a sample of other tracks on the Lost Highway label.
Among the songs was today’s SOTD, actually titled ‘Lost Highway,’ a duet by Willie Nelson and Kurt Nilsen.
‘Wind Out’ (or ‘Windout’ as it appears on the album liner notes) is a track included on R.E.M.’s 1987 collection of odds and ends, Dead Letter Office.
In the album’s entertaining liner notes, written by guitarist Peter Buck with a fair amount of self-deprecating wit (thought not in this case), the song is described this way:
This is one of our earliest songs, written in the summer of 1980. We recorded it for our second album. In retrospect, I think that it would have fit on Reckoning very well, but at the time we decided not to included it.
> a soundtrack that shall remain nameless.
Liz Phair’s 2010 album Funstyle was self-released by the artist after she left Capitol Records. The album followed a couple of poorly-received stabs at a more commercial sound and signaled her increasing dissatisfaction with the direction of her career.
Funstyle fared a bit better, critically, but just a bit. It also seemed for awhile like the last thing Phair would release, until she returned 11 years later with the well-reviewed Soberish.
Maybe the Random iTunes Fairy was spooked by my suggestion last week that I should consider culling the dead weight from my music library. Once again, she has served up a great song by one of my favorite artists.
When ‘Burning Down the House’ popped up, I was sure I’d featured it before. But turns out I had only posted the live version from Stop Making Sense, two years ago on another Random Weekend. Shockingly, that was my first SOTD from the classic concert album. And I’ve only posted one more since.
Meet Me In Montauk 