Live Collection brings together every live cover we can find from an artist. And we find a lot.
You think Vermont music, you might think flanneled hippies strumming mandolins. Not Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. They may come from the great wooded north, but their big soul sound comes straight from Dixie with a side of south-side Chicago. Potter is a vocal tour de force, a skinny white girl with an enormous voice. She can do a two-hour show without fading a bit and her hot four-piece band keeps right in step. Searing guitar solos abound, but nothing can upstage that voice.
Through years of near-constant touring, the band has amassed quite a stack of covers. In our latest Live Collection, we collect every concert cover we could find (thanks archive.org!). That includes blasts through Blondie, My Morning Jacket, and a whole lot of Neil Young – including a 14-minute “Cortez the Killer” that should be required listening for any rock band. Josh Ritter joins the band on John Prine’s “Pretty Good,” but otherwise they don’t need any help in blowing the roof off any building they play.
As a special bonus, below the main set we have the thematic new covers from their 2009 New Year’s Eve show. The band had clearly been spinning the Top Gun soundtrack a lot; they cover seven songs from the darn thing! And not just the original soundtrack either. The band apparently took to the 1999 Special Edition CD, cause they run through three of the four old-school bonus tracks as well. In between ’80s classics like “Take My Breath Away” and “Danger Zone,” the band throws out Top Gun lines as a wink to clued-in audience members. “This is Ghost Rider requesting permission for a flyby!” Permission granted. Continue reading: Live Collection: Grace Potter and the Nocturnals »
Vampire Weekend first covered Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m Goin’ Down” a week or so ago, but the cell phone concert captures were too awful to bother with. Well now a pristine recording has surfaced. Was it worth the wait? Depends on what you compare it to.
The band performed the song for Seattle radio station The End 107.7. Their version strips away the Born in the U.S.A. original’s sax solo ‘80s drum pounds (sorry Max Weinberg). The piano-guitar arrangement suits the tune better. It’s nothing transformative, but it’s miles better than that “Ruby Soho” they did earlier this year. Watch the Bruce below, then relive the “Ruby Soho” if you feel like punishing yourself. Continue reading: Vampire Weekend Go Down on Bruce Springsteen. Wait, no… »
Song of the Day posts one cool cover every morning. Catch up on past installments here.
If “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” isn’t up there among your favorite Beatles songs, you’re doing it wrong. This White Album gem isn’t just one great song; it’s four. Shifting time signatures, strange rhythms, and off-beat guitar squalls pushed the boundaries of how much you could cram into two minutes and forty-four seconds. It constantly threatens to careen off the rails like a train taking a turn too fast, but it never does.
Thinking-man’s guitar hero Marc Ribot has the goods to keep all that in line. After all, the man accompanied Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs-era reinvention, during which he played the guitar “like a midget’s bar mitzvah” (Tom’s words). His performances marked album high points, so it’s no surprise his solo interpretation of “Happiness” should be similarly transcendent. He first recorded it for his 2001 album Saints, but seeing him coax it from his guitar live is even more impressive. Here’s a clip from ’07. Continue reading: Song of the Day: Marc Ribot, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (The Beatles cover) »
Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
In 1966 the Rolling Stones already had five chart-topping singles under their belts in Britain (two in America). Over the previous few years, classics like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “The Last Time,” and “Get Off of My Cloud” had hit the world like an atom bomb. Great songs all, but much like the Beatles‘ earliest work, they were all a bit…samey. To be sure, it was the best sort of samey-ness, but it wouldn’t have forecasted the group still selling out stadiums 45 years later.
“Paint It Black” gave the first whiff of that longevity. It wasn’t as big a hit as the three aforementioned singles, but it was their first real departure from the blues-band mold. The middle eastern melody, the spooky sitar riff underpinning the verses, the humming break two-thirds of the way through. This was different. This was out there. Continue reading: Five Good Covers: Paint It Black (The Rolling Stones) »
Song of the Day posts one cool cover every morning. Catch up on past installments here.
In the November 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine, John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote a fascinating article. The subject: his attempts to fact-check a piece Greil Marcus was writing on “Last Kind Words Blues.” The song, by the mysterious Geeshie Wiley, existed only as a scratchy, hard-to-make-out recording. Marcus wanted to quote some lines, but he couldn’t make out the exact words. To investigate, Sullivan visited famed guitarist/folk historian John Fahey. The back and forth of them trying to puzzle out this ancient recording is a must-read. Here’s an excerpt from earlier in the piece though, of Sullivan describing the mysterious recording:
Not many ciphers have left as large and beguiling a presence as Geeshie Wiley. Three of the six songs she and Elvie Thomas recorded are among the greatest country-blues performances ever etched into shellac, and one of them, “Last Kind Words Blues,” is an essential work of American art, sans qualifiers, a blues that isn’t a blues, that is something other, but is at the same time a perfect blues, a pinnacle.
Some have argued that the song represents a lone survival of an older, already vanishing, minstrel style; others that it was a one-off spoor, an ephemeral hybrid that originated and died with Wiley and Thomas, their attempt to play a tune they’d heard by a fire somewhere. The verses don’t follow the A-A-B repeating pattern common to the blues, and the keening melody isn’t like any other recorded example from that or any period. Likewise with the song’s chords: “Last Kind Words Blues” opens with a big, plonking, menacing E but quickly withdraws into A minor and hovers there awhile (the early blues was almost never played in a minor key). The serpentine dual-guitar interplay is no less startling, with little sliding lead parts, presumably Elvie’s, moving in and out of counterpoint. At times it sounds like four hands obeying a single mind and conjures scenes of endless practicing, the vast boredoms of the medicine-show world. - Read the full article.
Back in July we got a first peak at John Legend and the Roots’ upcoming protest-music cover album. Their version of “Wake Up Everybody” was tight (in both senses of the word), but nothing mind-blowing. Guess they were saving that for the second look. Well, it’s here, and…wow. Their version of Bill Withers’ 1973 lament “I Can’t Write Left-Handed” is an absolute barn-burner. The studio clip below lets you watch it all come together. They run through cycle after cycle of build and climax, each peak higher than the one before. This goes on for eleven glorious minutes.
Legend croons and Questlove executes some precision drum rolls, but the real star here may be guitarist “Captain” Kirk Douglas. He adds brilliantly understated licks behind each Legend line before unleashing a typically nutso solo. Relegated to the sidelines, MC Black Thought nods approvingly. (via 2dopeboyz) Continue reading: John Legend and the Roots: Eleven Minutes of Soul »
Björk covers are a tricky business. The originals are so idiosyncratic (read: weird) they seem to defy reinterpretation. How do you replicate the bizarre studio productions? Everyone from Radiohead to the Decemberists have tried, with mixed results.
Three Swedish artists attempted the, if not impossible, at least the very difficult at a ceremony awarding Björk the Polar Music Prize. Amazingly, even with the woman herself watching, all three pulled it off. Pop maven and 2010 breakout star Robyn, who covered Alicia Keys a few weeks ago, rocks some Björk-worthy shoulder pads for an orchestral-dance “Hyperballad.” Songwriter Ane Brun, who we recently heard cover Alphaville, utilizes the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra to their full potential in a delicate “Jóga.” Swedish duo Wildbirds & Peacedrums brought a little steel drum to “Human Behaviour.” Hard to know which is the best, though the honoree herself seems particularly moved by Brun. Continue reading: Lots of Swedes (incl. Robyn) Cover Björk »
Song of the Day posts one cool cover every morning. Catch up on past installments here.
Yesterday we heard the Walkmen cover “Driver 8,” so we’ll keep the R.E.M. momentum going with arguably their most famous song and inarguably the most famously mandolin riff in popular music. Think how many high schoolers picked up the mandolin to learn this run. And think how many, upon learning it, realized they knew no other songs that featured the mandolin. Whoops.
One way to avoid this is to perform the song without a mandolin at all, as Amber Rubarth does. Her twee-folk lament needs just a gentle guitar melody and some high-pitched harmonies. We checked in with her to find out more; here’s what she said: Continue reading: Song of the Day: Amber Rubarth, “Losing My Religion” (R.E.M. cover) »
