Feb 012013
 

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

The Doors are in the unfortunate position of being overwhelmed by their mystique. They were never a band that coasted on an image – they released eight albums (six studio, one live, one best-of) in the five years before Jim Morrison’s death, and two more studio albums afterward. Their dark voice was not always welcome in the peace ‘n’ love sixties, but they never stopped raising it. Some of their albums are spotty, but the best of their work has stood the test of time better than that of many if not most of their contemporaries. Alas, too many people today know them as nothing more than a vehicle for Morrison to wield the persona that famously led Rolling Stone to declare him hot, sexy, and dead. But in 1967, there was nobody like them, and their self-titled debut album proved them to be a cohesive unit with a vision only those four men could convey.
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Mar 302012
 

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Millions of words, if not tens of millions, have been written about Bob Dylan‘s Blonde on Blonde since its 1966 release – how “the quintessential New York hipster” (as Al Kooper called him) met the cream of the Nashville session musician crop and the alchemy that resulted; how the album, Dylan’s third in fourteen months, saw him at the pinnacle of his songwriting powers, marrying surreal imagery to wrenching emotion with lyrics that can truly be called poetry; how critics from that day to this recognize it as less an album than a great artistic achievement of the 20th century; how it inspired so many who heard it (to name just one, Robyn Hitchcock called “Visions of Johanna” “the reason I started writing songs” on his all-Dylan cover album Robyn Sings). So, rather than dwell on all the stories surrounding the songs, let’s move right on to hearing those songs again for the first time, thanks to the (re)creative abilities of the following fourteen performers. (Thanks as well to reader JoeLer for suggesting that Blonde on Blonde receive the Cover Me Full Album treatment.) Continue reading »