Today’s 1995 album isn’t exactly new to me — it found a home in my CD collection when I married my wife 27 years ago. But I haven’t spent enough time with it over the years to consider it a favorite.
Annie Lennox’s Medusa was her second solo album after taking a break from Eurythmics in 1990. Her first release, Diva, was a very successful collection of original pop soul songs. This one had a similar sound but focused entirely on covers of other artists’ material.
This track, from Annie Lennox’s 1995 hit covers album Medusa, is the odd song out on that record.
The lineup features renditions of cuts by Paul Simon, Procol Harum, Bob Marley, Al Green, Neil Young, The Clash and The Temptations. And ‘Downtown Lights’ by Blue Nile.
What the hell is Blue Nile, you ask? Good question. They are a Scottish band that has moderate success with this song in 1989. And by “moderate success” I mean it reached #67 on the UK charts.
As a nice companion piece to yesterday’s live album, today we have a random cut from an album of covers.
I feel the same way about covers albums that I do about live albums. They’re generally not worth my time. I do enjoy covers performed in concert or tucked into an album of originals, but releasing a full-length covers album strikes me as lazy.
I’ve always been dismissive of people who say things like “I like Bob Dylan’s music, I just wish I could hear it sung by somebody else.”
For me, Dylan’s voice is as much a part of his music as the chords, lyrics and instrumentation. While an occasional cover can be interesting, I no more want to hear Dylan’s catalog sung by others than I want to watch a foreign film dubbed into English.
Back when Annie Lennox first reached popularity as lead singer of the Eurythmics, she was better known for her androgynous orange-haired style and her atmospheric creep-rock music than her voice. Sure, she unleashed some high-pitched wailing in ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’ but for the most part her vocal performance in that song was wonderfully robotic.
But in later years, Lennox proved to have one of the richest voices in the business. It was showcased beautifully on her 1995 solo record, Medusa, an album of covers on which she performs songs by the likes of Al Green, The Clash, Neil Young and Bob Marley.
Meet Me In Montauk 