Here’s a beautiful song from 2007’s Grammy-winning Raising Sand, a collaboration between Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.
This is the sort of safe, adult contemporary album that Grammy loves to award with its top prize (think Norah Jones, Steely Dan, Adele, Ray Charles, Celine Dion, Santana, Herbie Hancock, Dixie Chicks and the O Brother Where Art Thou? performers in just the last 20 years).
When today’s random iTunes song — the title track from Shelby Lynne’s 2008 album of Dusty Springfield covers — popped up, I was prepared to write a “whatever happened to?” post. Often these Random Weekend selections serve as reminders of artists who recorded their last albums years ago and then fell off the map.
But to my surprise, Lynne has stayed quite busy since this record. She started her own label and released four well-reviewed albums between 2010 and 2015.
My exploration of David Bowie’s catalog comes to an end with a 33-year leap to his final album, Blackstar, released on his 69th birthday, just two days before he died.
It’s hard to view Blackstar without the lens of Bowie’s death, especially when it seems he was very much aware that this would be his final artistic statement. Lyrics such as “Something happened on the day he died,” “look up here, I’m in heaven” and “I’m trying to, I’m dying to” are powerful and bittersweet because he recorded and released them so close to his death.
The album that many Bowie fans pinpoint as David Bowie’s first big miss, a soulless exercise in commercialism, also happens to be the biggest success of his career.
1983’s Let’s Dance was indeed crafted with a broader audience in mind. Bowie described it as “a refocusing of Young Americans” and the singles do share the catchy exuberance of that album’s title track.
David Bowie entered the 80s with the release of Scary Monsters, an album that brought the experimental rock of his Berlin phase into more commercial territory. It’s a far more accessible album but still an adventurous one.
It’s also, according to popular consensus, the last great album Bowie ever recorded. Just about every one of his future releases was compared unfavorably to this one, or more charitably called his best work since Scary Monsters.
Meet Me In Montauk 