Today is my sister’s birthday, and you all know what it means when a birthday falls on a Random Weekend. Time to spin the wheel and see what the Random iTunes Fairy has in store by way of celebration.
And it’s… ‘Shattered,’ the final track on The Rolling Stones’ 1978 album Some Girls. This album, which embraced the dominant disco sound of the era, was critically acclaimed and became the band’s top-selling album.
Like Alicia Keys, The Rolling Stones have released a new song perfectly suited to our current times that was actually written well before the coronavirus pandemic.
‘Living in a Ghost Town’ was originally recorded more than a year ago, but Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took another pass at it to make it more relevant to our lives in quarantine. I assume the line “life was so beautiful, then we all got locked down” was a recent addition.
‘Dear Doctor’ is a fun country-blues track from 1968’s Beggars Banquet, The Rolling Stones’ first masterpiece.
By my count, The Stones released four albums on which I would hang that m-word. And they released them all in a row.
First up was Beggars Banquet, followed by Let it Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1961), and Exile on Main St. (1972).
It’s tough to consider the most recent year when compiling a ‘best of the decade’ list. The films both benefit from being freshest in your mind and suffer from not having enough time to really sink in.
I’ve read a couple of decade recaps that set aside 2019 altogether for that reason, which I find silly. How can you assess a movie decade while looking at just nine years’ worth of films?
Another alternative would be to hold off on creating this list until 6 months or a year from now, when 2019 has the benefit of a little more hindsight. But I’m not that patient.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time with The Rolling Stones’ catalog, after coming to them a little late in my musical life. I know seven or eight of their albums very well, including the half-dozen classics they released between 1966 and 1972.
Somehow, though, I never got around to 1973’s Goats Head Soup. Maybe that’s because, as the follow-up to Exile on Main St. and the start of a half-decade period considered their first creative slump, it just doesn’t have the cachet of the rest of their work.
Meet Me In Montauk 