A couple of years ago I finally succumbed to all of the great things I’d been reading about Miranda Lambert and bought a couple of her albums.
Regular readers of this blog know that I fell hard for her blend of sass and sensitivity, and songwriting chops I’d never associated with country music.
The other day I was very excited when my Facebook feed served up not just the usual mix of ads and self-help soliloquies but an announcement that immediately moved me to action.
Tift Merritt, the singer-songwriter beloved by me and a handful of NPR listeners who recognize her as a sublime cross between Joni Mitchell and Lucinda Williams, is coming to the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.
This might not be a popular decision around these parts, but I was intrigued enough by my three-week exploration of Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs that I’ve decided to continue the experiment.
Over the next three weeks I will dissect each song on Arcade Fire’s 2007 album Neon Bible, starting with the first single, ‘No Cars Go.’
Here’s one of those early tracks from the first volume of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series. This song was an outtake from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
Unlike many of the songs that were inexplicably left off of Dylan’s albums over the years, scrapping this one was a good choice. It’s certainly not bad, but neither does it rise to the high level of everything else on Freewheelin’.
Laura Nyro was not only ahead of her own time (late 60s and early 70s), but pretty much every time after that as well. This is some crazy shit.
Nyro has a knack for writing 4-minute songs that feel more like 45 minutes. I mean that in both a good and bad way. She is a master of shifts in both tone and time signature, throwing left-field change-ups into every song, which certainly makes for interesting listening, though it can also be a bit exhausting. This certainly isn’t Sunday morning chill-out music.
Meet Me In Montauk 