Awhile back I posted my finalists for the best films of the 00s. Now I turn my attention to the best albums.
This is a harder assignment because I find my musical taste fluctuates a lot more than my movie taste. A band I obsess over today might not get much play 6 months from now. I tend to go through phases where I’ll play all of an artist’s albums for weeks at a time and then shelve them for a couple of months before revisiting them.
As legendary a career as Bruce Springsteen has had over the 36 years he’s been recording, I believe his most successful run has been in the last four years. And when you’re talking about a rock-n-roller who turns 60 this year that’s an amazing accomplishment.
Like one of his heroes, Bob Dylan, Springsteen has somehow reinvented himself while remaining true to everything that has always made him great. There is a clear line from classics such as Born to Run and Nebraska to the provocative, inspiring albums he’s delivered since 2005 — Devils & Dust, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Magic and now Working on a Dream.
It takes some guts to post your version of a bona fide classic. But if you do it as good as this guy has with Lucinda Williams’ ‘Lake Charles,’ why the hell not?
I love what he’s done with the vocals… his Nick Drake-like whispering, delicate delivery is a fascinating counterpoint to Williams’ rugged and bluesy performance. And he has sped up some lines, swallowed others, to take something familiar and make it just new enough.
This guy is a member of a band called Boyce Avenue, so I guess he doesn’t exactly fit in with the amateur YouTube players I’m trying to focus on this week, but this is a really good version of a really good song so I decided to include it.
It’s interesting how a straight-up pop/dance song can take on a different dimension when stripped down to its basics. Manzano isn’t even changing the melody or tempo of the song… he’s just playing it on an acoustic guitar. But it feels different.
I am wrapping up a week from hell and this is the closest I’ve been to running out of steam and not having a Song of the Day ready to roll. But I am not prepared to break a 205-song streak, so I must muscle through.
In order to buy myself some time, I’m going to take it easy this week and feature some cover songs by people on YouTube. This will save me the headache of dealing with the record label Nazis who keep pulling my videos, and I won’t spend a whole lot of time writing them up either.
