So last week I complained that the Random iTunes Fairy has been serving up too much Bob Dylan. And she responds by dropping the second Robyn track in three weeks.
I’m not sure what to make of that, but somehow I think I’m being taunted. Damn you, Steve Jobs!
Well, going from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen isn’t exactly the sort of wild surprise I was calling for in yesterday’s post, but it will do.
‘Working On a Dream’ is the title track from Springsteen’s 2009 album, one of three great records The Boss has released over the past six years (the others being Magic and this year’s Wrecking Ball). If you go back two more years, you can throw Devils & Dust and We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Sessions into the mix.
Five excellent albums in eight years, all recorded during his mid-50s to mid-60s.
One of the downsides of a truly random selection — such as that of my Random Weekend Songs of the Day — is that you wind up with clusters.
I haven’t checked the numbers, but it seems like tracks from Dylan’s Bootleg Series have turned up here on a pretty regular basis. Granted, he has released nine volumes of those bootlegs — all double-CD sets — so those songs make up a healthy percentage of my music collection. Around 3 percent, to be exact.
But 3-in-100 odds aren’t exactly the sort you’d bet heavily on in Vegas. Mathematically, these songs are over-performing.
Here’s a song from one of the five or six albums in my CD collection that belong exclusively to my wife. I have never heard this song or this album before, and I listened to only about half of it just now before posting it.
R&B is definitely not in my musical genome. I have zero patience for this sort of music. I would crawl across broken glass to get within ten feet of Beyoncé, but I find only a few of her songs listenable. And Mary J. Blige? Not even on my radar.
I had just listened to several songs from Tempest, Bob Dylan’s newest album (review to come), when I clicked the ‘shuffle’ button to choose my next Random Weekend selection.
And there was Bob again, 36 years earlier, performing a song that didn’t make it onto any of his 35 studio albums.
According to the Bootleg Series liner notes, Dylan performed ‘Seven Days’ only five times, during his celebrated Rolling Thunder tour. One of those is captured here in stirring fashion.
Meet Me In Montauk 