Tag Archives: Music

New Arrangements and Duets

14 October 2024 By in Music Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Van Morrison, at 79, has released his new album “New Arrangements and Duets”, featuring previously recorded but unreleased music that has been hidden away in his music vault for years. Morrison announced the album on Instagram, saying, “This album represents a small percentage of the huge amount of unreleased material we are hoping to roll out in the near future, rather than letting it gather dust in some archive.”

The album includes big band tracks as a homage to Van Morrison’s father and a selection of duets with the likes of Willie Nelson, Joss Stone, Curtis Stigers, and Kurt Elling.

The attached audio file is a snippet of “What’s Wrong with this Picture” featuring a duet with Willie Nelson, accompanied by Willie’s son, Lukas, on guitar. The song was recorded in 2018 and 2019.

Source: James Daykin, Entertainment Focus. Apple Music. AllMusic. Graphic: New Arrangement and Deuts Album cover, copyright Exile Productions Inc.

Ohio Players

30 September 2024 By in Music Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Black Keys, with their new 2024 album, Ohio Players, haven’t confused their listeners this much since the critical acclaimed 2014 experimental acid trip, Turn Blue. This current collection of genre twisting songs suggests that the band has gone past peak Black Keys and wants to take their music into a new direction.

Ok, go down a different path but maybe it would be useful to pick one compass point rather than all of them at once. The record flows with currents of Neil Young and Cinnamon Girl, Paul McCartney’s post Beatles touch of sonic wonder, Ennio Morricone backing up Clint Eastwood, rap sexual crudities, and thankfully a bunch of album saving signature Black Keys blues and soul.

A confusing album but throw out the rap and it’s a decent contribution to the band’s oeuvre, not their best effort but enjoyable.

Trivia: The album title, Ohio Players, is a hat tip to Auerbach and Carney’s Ohio roots along with a tribute to one of the best funk-R&B bands from the 70s.

Source: AllMusic. Apple Music. Graphic: The Black Keys – Don’t Let Me Go, from Ohio Players, Easy Eye Sound and Nonesuch.

Misfiring

23 September 2024 By in Music Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Post Malone, for his 6th studio album, F-Trillion (Long Bed), brought in 15 mostly country artists to help him put together his first all country effort. For the finished product he only needed 6—to act as pallbearers.

Except for the first two tracks, Wrong Ones and Finer Things, his twang belts out sing-songy mono-melodic tunes, more suitable for his past life as a rapper, than asking the likes of Hank Williams, Jr., Dolly Parton, and Tim McGraw to help him transition into mainstream country.

Speaking with Kelleigh Bannen of Apple Music about his latest effort Post Malone says, “I’ve always wanted to make a record like this, but for the longest time it seemed so inaccessible, because I didn’t know how the hell it worked.”  Maybe for his 7th studio album he will have learned how it works.

Source. Apple Music. Graphic: Album Cover for the extended version by Austin Post. Official video track for Finer Things. Second track on the album.

Friendlytown

9 September 2024 By in Music Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Steve Cropper of Booker T & the MGs and Stax fame, has released the rockin’ soulful blues album, ‘Friendlytown’ with his new band the Midnight Hour. This is his 120th album that he has either collaborated on or has issued as a solo artist.

The Midnight Hour band includes vocalist Roger C. Reale, keyboardist Eddie Gore, drummer Nioshi Jackson, and guitarist Billy Gibbons. Additionally, Felix Cavaliere, Brian May, Jon Tiven, and Simon Kirk join in on various songs.

At 82 years of age Cropper hasn’t lost a note and has found several new ones. The album is rich, tite, and one of his best.

Cropper, since the late 1950s has recorded with a veritable who’s who of rock, soul, and blues musicians, including John Lennon, Rod Stewart, B.B. King, and many, many others, garnering along way seven Grammy nominations, winning two, including the Best Rhythm and Blues Song, ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’ with Otis Redding.

Trivia: ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’ sold 4 million copies as a single, topped the Billboard Hot 100, became the sixth most performed song in 20th century, and the Rolling Stone ranked it as the 26th Greatest Song of All Time.

Source: AllMusic. Apple Music. Graphic: Album Cover, copyright Provogue Records.

Cactus: Temple of Blues—Influences & Friends

29 July 2024 By in Music Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Carmine Appice, rock drummer extraordinaire, in an unguarded moment of over-exuberance has expanded his Cactus band to proportions that could be considered ‘just right’, producing a re-imagined compilation of previously recorded Cactus songs that may be simply stated as full throttle blues, boogie and rock sensations.

Released on disc and vinyl by Cleopatra Records on 7 June 2024, Cactus’ ‘Temple of Blues: Influences and Friends’ showcases 14 of the band’s greatest songs from their first 3 albums that they recorded in the early 1970s.

Appice brings in a who’s who of past and present marquee rockers, including Joe Bonamassa, Ted Nugent, Billy Sheehan, Dee Snider, Pat Travers, Warren Hayes, and many others to compliment the bands songs along with a few blues standards such as Willie Dixon’s ‘Evil’.

Carmine Appice, ranked the 28th ‘Greatest Drummer of All Time’ by the Rolling Stone in 2016, formed and played not only for Cactus but also was an original member of the 60s psychedelic band: Vanilla Fudge, the power rock trio Beck, Bogert, & Appice and was part of Rod Stewart’s backing band.

In the trivia department the ‘Temple of Blues’ cover shows a picture of the original Cactus lineup in the background arch of the temple (from left Bogert, Day, McCarty, and Appice) which comes from a trade ad that ran in a 1970 Billboard issue.

Source: Cleopatra Records. Graphic: Cactus Album Cover, Cleopatra Records copyright.

Twisters: The Album

22 July 2024 By in Music Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

‘Twisters: The Album’ was released on 19 July 2024, the same day as the movie premiered in the theaters. ‘The Album’ contains 29 high stepping and slow rolling country music tracks befitting a movie set in Oklahoma. This is the best original artist’s country soundtrack since the 1980 ‘Urban Cowboy’ which wasn’t exactly 100% country but close enough to make the point that it has been a long time since the genre has played front and center in a big budget movie.

Luke Combs’ song, ‘Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma’, first track on the album, was released as a single in May of 2024 prior to the release of the album and topped out on the US Hot Country charts at no. 4 and no. 23 on Billboard Hot 100.  The album contains additional singles from Miranda Lambert, Tucker Wetmore, Megan Moroney, and many, many more artists.

‘Twisters: The Album’ is an authentic ‘Feeling Country’.

Source: Apple Music.  Graphic: Album cover, Atlantic copyright.

Elvis

8 July 2024 By in Music Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Elvis Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis album was released 50 years ago on 8 July 1974 by RCA Victor. The recording was captured at a Mid-South Coliseum concert in Memphis, Tennessee 14 weeks earlier on the 20th of March.

The Memphis ‘concert’ included two shows each on the 16th and 17th with the actual recording occurring during the fifth show on the 20th. The five sold-out shows were estimated to have sold more than 60,000 tickets with some seating going for as much as $10.

In addition to the Memphis shows a ‘rehearsal’ concert was held in Richmond, Virgina on 18th of March in which the album Forty-Eight Hours to Memphis was recorded. The set lists for the Richmond and Memphis recordings were nearly identical.

Although the concert and subsequent album release were not in the same league as Elvis’ 68 Comeback Special, the Memphis album contained a truer representation of his career and his genre crossing-over appeal.

The album was certified gold, reaching number 2 on Billboard’s Country chart, number 40 on Billboard 200 and garnered another Grammy for Elvis for his rendition of the gospel song “How Great Thou Art”.

The original 1974 album left out the concert songs “Suspicious Minds” and “Polk Salad Annie” but were re-inserted back into the FTD Records 2004 re-issue of Live on Stage in Memphis. Sony’s 2014 40-year re-issue of the album includes the FTD Records 2004 re-issue on disc one plus also including the ‘rehearsal’ concert preformed at the Richmond (Viginia) Coliseum two days before the Memphis concert.

Source:  Sony Legacy Release by Troy Yeary, The Mystery Train Blog and Elvis Australia. Graphic:  Elvis at the Richmond Coliseum, 18 March 1974, Copyright FTD Records.

Blondie

1 July 2024 By in Music, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Fifty years ago in 1974, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein formed Blondie in New York from the ashes of their previous and very forgettable group: the Stilettoes. It was an effort of love between the two but for Harry it also allowed her alter ego to express itself to the world.

Stating in her 2019 memoirs “Face It” she says that in the band she was acting out a role, “I was saying things in songs that female singers didn’t really say back then. I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up yet I was very serious.”

The group has released 11 studio albums to date including their 1978 Parallel Lines which reached no. 6 on the U.S. charts and no. 1 in the U.K. The album included their no. 1 smash hit Heart of Glass, a universal lament of unrequited love.

Source: Blondie.net. Face It.  Graphic: Blondie, 1977, no known copyright.

Before the Flood

24 June 2024 By in Music, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

50 years ago, 20 June 1974, Bob Dylan and The Band released their double live album Before the Flood, peaking at number 3 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and going Platinum in the U.S. In addition to being Dylan’s first live album, the music was a compilation of Dylan’s greatest hits.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine of All Music comments “Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release. He could only have performed interpretations this radical with a group as sympathetic, knowing of his traits as the band, whose own recordings here are respites from the storm. And this is a storm — the sound of a great rocker, surprising his band and audience by tearing through his greatest songs in a manner that might not be comforting, but it guarantees it to be one of the best live albums of its time. Ever, maybe.”

Tom Nolan with Rolling Stone notes that “Throughout Bob Dylan‘s performances on this in-concert album there is evident an effort to match the material — nearly all from much earlier in his career — with a suitable style of delivery, a vocal stance which can express in a later year the brilliant and sometimes malevolent energy contained by these pieces when they were first created.”

The album was high energy, something that Dylan and the Band were not known for, but it brought a side to their music that, up till then, no one had experienced.

Source:  All Music. The Rolling Stone Album Guide. Graphic: Album Cover Before the Flood, copyright Columbia Records.

Beck-Ola

17 June 2024 By in Music Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This week in June of 1969 Jeff Beck released his second studio album: “Beck-Ola”, and the first album credited to the Jeff Beck Group.  The album peaked on the Billboard 200 at number 15 and is considered a major influence on the future of hard rock and heavy metal.

According to JeffBeck.com the album “cemented the Jeff Beck Group’s place in rock history as one of the prime architects of heavy metal. “It is what it is,” Beck said, recalling the album fondly, “just a snapshot of the situation at the time. The talent was there. We were pioneering heavy rock, big time.”

The album cover is a reproduction of Rene Magritte’s 1958 version of “The Listening Room”.  The apple to Magritte was a symbol for the tension between hidden and visible. Why this painting was chosen for the album remains something of a mystery, but it may just be an expression of adding something new and hidden, heavy metal, to something old and visible, pop and early rock.

The members of the Jeff Beck Group for this album included Beck, Ronny Wood, Rod Stewert, Nicky Hopkins, and Tony Newman, a super group of talent by any measure.

Source: JeffBeck.com. Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock, 1977. Rene Magritte Organization. Graphic: Beck-Ola Album cover, Epic Records, 1969.