I'm Not There

What looks to be a very interesting new Bob Dylan film, I'm Not There. The title comes from the elusive, ambiguous, mysterious, as yet officially unreleased Basement Tapes song, “I’m Not There (1956)”. Can’t wait to see this!

Rockabye Baby

I wasn’t aware of these until my kid sister pointed them out to me: lullaby renditions of some of rock music’s bigger acts: Radiohead, The Cure, Coldplay, Led Zeppelin, U2, etc. It’s mildly intriguing to see what the musician Michael Armstrong does with the songs. But once your curiosity is satisfied, it seems kind of pointless. The worst of it is the clichéd notion that music for the very young has to be made with vibraphone and glockenspiel.

Howard Fishman does the “Basement Tapes”

Check this out. And a sample mp3 of ‘Down in the Flood’ here.

Endless Highway: The Music of The Band

A new (the first?) tribute album to The Band. I’ve yet to buy the physical CD (I'm not sure it’s available as of this writing) but have downloaded the songs. Wow. This is a great compilation. And what makes it truly fabulous is how it reminds how great the original songs are. No one sings like Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Levon Helm but these covers are very, very good. Some of the best songwriting in the school of rock. All hail The Band.

Oh, and while I'm at it, check out the latest Hal Willner offering, Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, & Chanteys! Arrgghhh!

Paste Feb 07

New Paste magazine arrived in the mail the morning: The Shins on the cover plus new song on the sampler CD by Lucinda Williams!

Vancouver's Finest

A while ago I posted a rumour that The Police were to reunite. Turns out they’re rehearsing right here in Vancouver!

Bird Songs

I like what Sasha Frere-Jones writes about Andrew Bird in the latest New Yorker:

For years, the Chicago musician Andrew Bird took the stage alone, save for a violin, an electric guitar, a glockenspiel, and a sampler. Using these instruments, and an ability to whistle really well, Bird could perform his pastoral, zigzagging songs all by himself. . . . Bird . . . is about to release a new album, “Armchair Apocrypha,” . . . a vast, optimistic album about depressing things such as falling planes and empires; it downplays Bird’s whistle and keening violin and sounds a bit more like progressive rock of the seventies. Bird’s ambitions place him in a rough alliance with other artists who are writing long, complex compositions, such as Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom. Perhaps they are enlarging their songs in response to a world that has been dwarfing the charms of a three-minute single. Or perhaps they all know about the planetary alignment that’s due in 2008.

Covers

My covers, my friends’ covers, my neighbours’ covers.

My favourite Christmas song this year

The Atheist Christmas Carol by Vienna Teng.

“Thunder on the Mountain”

Newest Dylan video made up entirely of misc. career footage.

Disaster averted

I inadvertently deleted my last.fm account over the weekend. Two and a half years of music listening charts gone forever! But thankfully the last.fm people were able to restore my account to its formerly lustrous glory! How do you spell "whew"?

Speaking of "whew", isn't there something about Deb Talan's (of The Weepies as well as a solo career) voice that just about whistles? I love that quality, esp. in a song like "gotta have you" where she sings "No, nothing else wieiell (whistle) do / I've gotta have you". Be still my heart.

Danny *hearts* Jordan

*** missing YouTube video ***

I know I know — some of you disparage the posting of YouTube video on blogs. And yes, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is a slick Hollywood TV show. Still, the cast is great and the writing is smart and snappy. Plus they've managed a really nice blend of wit and pathos. And then there's the emerging romance between characters Danny Tripp and Jordan McDeere:

“I've been married twice before and I’m a recovering cocaine addict. And I know that’s no woman’s dream of a man — or of a father. Nonetheless I believe I’m falling in love with you. If you wanna run I understand. But you better get a good head start ’cuz I'm coming for you Jordan.”

Addendum: You can download the song "O Holy Night" from the Studio 60 website (worth it!). The above video clip (removed from YouTube) can be found there as well.

New releases

A couple of new upcoming CDs look interesting. Brad Wheeler of The Globe and Mail writes snappy little reviews:

Snake Road
Bob Lanois
Cordova Bay
Rating: ***
He's heavy, and he's my brother. Bob Lanois, who describes himself as a fledgling harmonica player, hails his uber-producer bro Daniel to make an instrumental album of cinematic scope and rural charm, with slight urban affectations. The musical landscapes are French-Canadian and vaguely Romanian, with a melodic mouth harp that shimmers, quivers and sometimes makes like a squeeze box. Last track “Up Set” has a lazy roller-rink organ and the slow lope of Roy Rogers's horse. Happy trails, indeed.

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards
Tom Waits
Anti-
Rating: ****
Tom Waits — surprise — has the most peculiar scrap heaps you'll ever wish to hear. The three CDs of Orphans collect batches of abandoned songs, cover tunes and songs that are written new, all grouped by style and theme. First disc “Brawlers” finds Waits bark-voiced and heavy-footed on rough-house blues and gutter-level rockabilly. “Bawlers” are sepia-toned laments, lullabies and rural ballads; on “Bastards,” things just get weird. In all, more than three hours of Waits, at turns shaking and soothing with songs that “survived the flood” and were wiped of muck — but not completely.

Thanksgiving epiphany

Dylan as a pilgrim?

You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs

Found an interesting book in the remainder pile at my local Chapters (and it was only 4 bucks!): The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad, edited by Sean Wilentz & Greil Marcus. It’s a great idea: a collection of essays on mostly ancient songs that are still part of our cultural vocabulary (nice jacket design too by Rubina Yeh). Haven’t gotten too far into it yet but I’m really enjoying Ann Powers’ piece on “The Water Is Wide”. She offers a compelling insight into why so much pop music is focused on things romantic:

"'Lovers are always waiting,' writes Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet, her inquiry into the structures of passion. ‘They hate to wait; they love to wait. Wedged between these two feelings, lovers come to think a great deal about time, and to understand it very well, in their perverse way.'

"When a lover falls in love, she tends to make time, carving out minutes on end to manufacture conversations, reflect upon encounters, and ponder whether what she’s sensing is real or not. Her love is definitely real in those stolen moments, when no one — most of all, the beloved — is around to dispute it. One reason why so much popular music revolves around romance is that music has the same power to set time aside, making a little private space within the day where the singer or the listener can build on inner ground. Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock and roll and drift away … give me a boat that can carry two. Music works like that longed-for vessel, carrying its lover to a place where reality isn’t crowding her out."

I don't wanna be hers, I wanna be yers

Reading a blog item recently on “pushing the rhyme envelope” in song reminded me of an audio clip (not great quality I'm afraid) I have of literary critic Christopher Ricks at the New Yorker Festival in 2001. All about Bob Dylan and his inventive use of rhyme, it's twelve minutes of pleasure and you can listen to it here. Especially fun is his discussion of Dylan's I Wanna Be Your Lover (which is a song worth tracking down by the way!).

typo_dylan

This has been around for a while but it's still a lot of fun to watch, esp. if you're a Dylan and/or typography fan.