It’s appropriate coming off three weeks dedicated to 1973 that today’s Random Weekend selection appears on another album from that year.
Band on the Run was the third album by Paul McCartney & Wings and their most successful. It is also the top-selling album of McCartney’s career outside The Beatles, reaching the #1 spot in five countries.
This is the ninth track I’ve featured from Lyle Lovett’s excellent 1996 album The Road to Ensenada, still his finest ever moment on record and one of my all-time favorite albums.
This is where I have to express my incredulity and dismay that Lovett hasn’t released an album of any sort in seven years, and no album of largely original material in 12. I’d like to think he has another Ensenada in him, but I don’t know if he’ll ever record again.
Josh Rouse’s third album, 2002’s Under Cold Blue Stars, is a loose concept album about a suburban couple in the 50s, modeled after Rouse’s own parents. The record traces the highs and lows of a lifetime spent together.
This track, ‘Summer Kitchen Ballad,’ comes late in the album and offers an impressionistic look at what I imagine are a handful of days spent in the kitchen watching the summer turn into fall.
Between the Buttons, released in 1967, was the seventh Rolling Stones album and the second (following the previous year’s Aftermath) to feature only songs written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
As was the custom back then, a separate American version was released, swapping out two tracks for two songs released in England as a double-A single: ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday.’ While I generally hate the concept of different UK and U.S. releases, there’s no question that the addition of those two songs make the American version of this album a bona fide masterpiece.
Joni Mitchell recorded this environmentally conscious classic in 1970, inspired by a trip to Hawaii.
“I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance,” she told an interviewer. “Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart… this blight on paradise.”
Meet Me In Montauk 