I was surprised to see that today’s random track is only the second song I’ve posted from Tift Merritt’s 2004 sophomore album Tambourine. Even more surprising is that the first time was just last summer, when another of its songs showed up on a random weekend.
My love for Tift Merritt is well-documented on the blog, and I have featured her more than 40 times, yet somehow only two of those posts come from this album, the first of hers I heard.
Has a lineup change ever had a more profound effect on a band than the addition of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to Fleetwood Mac?
Before Buckingham and Nicks joined the band, Fleetwood Mac released ten albums over seven years, and most music fans wouldn’t recognize a single song from that span. Or at least not the Fleetwood Mac version — they did write and record ‘Black Magic Woman,’ which was a hit for Santana.
Following his record label’s tepid reaction to what might be his best album, 1993’s Human Wheels, John Mellencamp decided to go in a different direction.
1994’s Dance Naked is a bare-bones rock record. Recorded over two weeks, with most of its songs captured in one or two takes, its best-known track is a cover of the Van Morrison song ‘Wild Nights.’
Here’s a live version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War,’ recorded in 1963 at Town Hall in New York City. This song appears in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home and later on the Bootleg Series release of that film’s soundtrack.
Those who read my criticism of Jackson Browne’s overtly political songs might wonder why I’m not similarly dismissive of this track. And it’s a fair question.
It’s been more than ten years since I last featured a song by Owsley, the stage name of singer-songwriter and power pop savant Will Owsley. I dedicated three posts to him in October of 2010 after learning that he had died by suicide in April of that year.
Reading those posts now, I was amused to see frequent commenter Dana lamenting the lack of Jackson Browne songs on the blog. He finally got his wish a decade later!
Meet Me In Montauk 