One of my musical blind spots has always been the “summer single.” I often read end-of-the-year wrap-ups in magazines such as Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone and see references to smash hits that inescapably poured out of boomboxes and car windows all summer and I’m at a loss, having never heard a note of any of them.
I’m the guy who’d never heard Black Eyed Peas’ ‘I Gotta Feeling’ until I was called on it earlier this year. Yes, I’m serious.
World Gone Wrong contains the third song I planned to include in the Dylan-inspired war screenplay I never got around to writing. Good As I Been to You contained ‘Canadee-I-O’ and ‘Arthur McBride,’ about, respectively, a woman who poses as a sailor to make it to the New World and two cousins who get into a violent showdown with a group of military recruiters.
‘Two Soldiers’ would have been the tragedy of the bunch. It details a moment between (you guessed it) two soldiers about to ride into battle. Each promises to do the right thing by the other’s family should he be the sole survivor. Things don’t work out so well.
Bob Dylan followed up his first album of covers, Good As I Been to You, a year later with 1993’s very similar World Gone Wrong. Again, the album featured just Dylan on his guitar and harmonica playing old folk and blue songs.
This might be the first time in Dylan’s career that he repeated himself. Over the previous 30 years, each of his new albums invariably marked a thematic or stylistic change from its predecessor. But World Gone Wrong sounded like it could have been made up of the outtakes of Good As I Been to You. The album received more critical praise than its partner, however, mostly due to its tighter focus.
Like a lot of people, my first exposure to Sinead O’Connor was through her breakthrough single ‘Nothing Compares 2 U,’ and following that through the album that contained it, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.
The woman performing that batch of songs was defiant, to a degree, but mostly delicate. She had an angelic voice and the face of an angel to match.
The Shins are a group I very much think of as an album band… their quirky pop is so meticulous and off-kilter that it’s hard to imagine it being performed live. So this clip from The Late Show with David Letterman came as a big surprise. Turns out The Shins are a pretty kickass live band.
The one time I joined the live audience of Letterman’s show, I wasn’t lucky enough to see a good band like The Shins. I got a Mongolian throat singer. And the celebrity guest was Richard Simmons. The people who saw The Shins got Ricky Gervais and Forest Whitaker.
