Tom McDonald

I grew up and got schooled in New England, hitch-hiked on a whim to pre-Grunge-era Seattle, never left. Took to designing software for authors and publishers. Raised two kids and quite a few chickens on a island in Puget Sound. Taught myself guitar and banjo and formed a covers band. I help run a map store; here’s an issue of our newsletter. I favor British tv comedies and novels by Cormac McCarthy.

Review: Joe Bonamassa’s ‘The Spirit of Rory: Live From Cork’

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Jun 302026
 

Spirit of RoryA year ago, blues-rock guitar czar Joe Bonamassa travelled to Cork, Ireland, to perform three concerts in tribute to that city’s native son, Rory Gallagher, the late great blues-rocker who as well as anyone defined the blues-rock genre. A week ago, the highlights from those concerts came out in both audio and video form as The Spirit of Rory: Live from Cork. The album consists of fourteen songs, a mix of Rory’s best originals and the blues covers that Rory recorded in his prime. Those recordings in turn inspired a very young Joe Bonamassa to become the towering talent he is today. With this release he is here to return the favor.

The Spirit of Rory may not meaningfully raise Rory’s profile with the general public, but Rory fans and Bonamassa fans alike are in store for a treat, or something of a disappointment. Or both.
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Good, Better, Best: “Isn’t It a Pity” (George Harrison)

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Jun 192026
 

Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.

Isn’t it a shame that George Harrison had to live so long in the shadow of Lennon/McCartney? But then, all songwriters live in that shadow–including John Lennon and Paul McCartney, whose solo careers never reached the creative heights of their partnership years. George was only unique in that some of his best songs were repeatedly denied a serious hearing by his own band. For example, “Isn’t It a Pity.”

Harrison pitched the song as early as Revolver in 1966. In Lennon’s judgement, it didn’t make the grade, neither for that album nor for any subsequent Beatle album. In Peter Jackson’s Get Back, there’s footage of George complaining about this to Lennon. The scene was a revelation to those who assumed (like I did) that “Isn’t It a Pity” (released in November 1970) was a hot take on the acrimonious Beatles breakup announced in April 1970.

So the question becomes, what reasons did George have in 1966 to feel so bleak? At age 23, he was already rich and famous beyond measure, the most influential guitarist of his guitar-obsessed generation. He was newly married to the actress/model Patti Boyd. He didn’t even have to tour anymore. Apart from the taxman, what did he have to moan about?

The early creation of “Isn’t It a Pity” affirms that there was substance to the trope of George as the “Spiritual Beatle.” His love of Indian music and his budding friendship with Ravi Shankar led to a deep engagement with Eastern spiritual concepts. Mature enough to see through material success, he pondered the nature of suffering, the traps of ego, greed, and ignorance. As much as the other Beatles got swept up in these newfound fascinations–transcendental meditation, especially–Lennon and McCartney (and manager Brian Epstein) may have felt George’s world-weariness needed to be held in check. After all, the band still felt compelled to project positivity in this post-touring period, with songs like “Good Day Sunshine,” “Getting Better,” and “All You Need is Love.”

For all his cynicism, George could also write cheerfully about love and sunshine with the best of them. His Abbey Road contributions “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” make that obvious. More to the point, consider the first single from his first post-Beatles solo album, All Things Must Pass, “My Sweet Lord” / “Isn’t It a Pity.” On this double A-side, George expresses something like spiritual rapture and joy on one side, and then on the flip side the opposite. Both sides are the real George Harrison.

It seems clear in retrospect that “My Sweet Lord” was really the A-est of the single’s two sides. “Isn’t It a Pity” seems not to have maintained the excitement it generated at the start. Several other tracks from All Things Must Pass have proven more popular in time, including the title track, the album’s third single, “What is Life,” and of course “My Sweet Lord,” with an order of magnitude more streams than any other song on the triple album.

So with “Here Comes the Sun” being the most successful Beatles song (in the streaming era at least), and “My Sweet Lord” being by far George’s best-selling solo track, let’s look again at the brooding flip side of George Harrison. And how other artists have responded to it.
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Review: Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow: A Tribute to the Music of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan

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May 282026
 

Where the Willow and the Dogwood GrowThe Tom Waits fanbase is not entirely starved for news lately, but most of it is about Waits’s acting career. On the music side, the news is small change: something about singing on a new Pogues tribute, and similar tidbits.

Then came the announcement of Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow, a star-studded tribute to the music of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. OK, it’s not new original music (we’ve waited 15 years for a new Waits album) but whatever it is, we’ll take it!

The excitement gives way, on closer inspection, to disappointment: there’s nothing actually new in this new release. (“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away,” to borrow a classic Waits-as-huckster phrase.)

Each cover has been available for years–in many cases, for three or four decades. So this is material we have heard before, and written about before–see our 2023 feature The 50 Best Tom Waits Covers Ever. The most recent of the tracks on hand is “Hold On” by Madison Cunningham, but even that one dates back six years. It’s a killer version, by the way, a clear highlight of this compilation.

Still, having these covers compiled in one place serves a purpose, if only to help reassess the song catalog. And realistically, the number of Waits devotees who have actually listened to all these songs is miniscule; they could fit in a single booth at an all-night diner. If a song is new to you, then it’s new music, regardless of its original release date.

The very title of the album suggests a new framing, a fresh lens: the notion that Waits’s song-writing changed when he partnered with Brennan, and their extensive and lengthy collaboration deserves its own celebration.
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That’s a Cover?: “Love Buzz” (Nirvana / Shocking Blue)

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Jan 092026
 

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Anyone alive and actively listening to music in 1991 heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and felt its pull. Listeners by the millions dove into the tar-pit trap of Nirvana and the whole grunge thing. This is common knowledge today. But less well known is the fact the first Nirvana single to get international recognition (if very few listeners) came out a few years earlier, and that was “Love Buzz.”

Released in 1988, “Love Buzz” became the very first single issued by the band. It was also the very first single released by the newly-formed indie label Sub Pop Records, and it remains Sub Pop’s all-time best-selling single. (Of course, it only began to sell after Nirvana signed to a major label and released Nevermind.)

In retrospect, “Love Buzz” seems like a strange pick for a debut single. Bleach, Nirvana’s first LP, offered several better options. How about the album’s opening salvo, “Blew”? Or how about the song Nirvana performed more times than any other–“School”? Finally, the obvious question: Why not “About a Girl”? Buried in the middle of Bleach, “About a Girl” is an order of magnitude more popular than the sludgy and chaotic “Love Buzz.”

Each of these other tracks had the advantage of being original Kurt Cobain compositions. Seems like a songwriter would want their debut single to spotlight their songwriting talent, right?

But no, they went with “Love Buzz,” a cover, and an obscure cover at that.
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One Great Cover: The Third Mind’s “Sally Go ’Round the Roses”

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Nov 282025
 

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

For our “What’s your favorite cover of a traditional song” post from last November, I wanted to write about The Third Mind’s version of “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” It seemed like the perfect chance to collect my thoughts about The Third Mind, a “supergroup” led by fiery guitarist Dave Alvin (formerly of The Blasters, The Knitters, and X). After all, The Third Mind featured the spell-binding singer Jesse Sykes, who had fallen into a mysterious silent since 2011.

Except I found out that “Sally Go ’Round the Roses” is not a traditional song. Not even close. It was written in 1963, and recorded by The Jaynetts that same year.

OK, so I was wrong. In my defense, Joan Baez misled me. In the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, we see Baez in a hotel room singing “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” Baez mostly played traditional ballads (when not playing Dylan covers), so I assumed this song too was “trad.” I also knew that the British folk band Pentangle–those revivers of traditional British Isles roots music–had covered the song on an early album.

But you know what they say about people who assume.
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Five Good Covers: “Time After Time” (Cyndi Lauper)

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Nov 032025
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Some songs have an adaptive trait that allows it to survive out in the musical wild. Trends come and go, stylistic sea changes surge and retreat, and tech revolutions rise and fall; they cause other great songs to fall to the wayside, while the truly classic song only gains luster as time goes by. For me, “Time After Time” is one of those songs.

I grumble every year at this time about the wrong artists getting into the Rock Hall of Fame. (What I really mean is that my favorite performer has once again been overlooked.) But this year I’m glad for Cyndi Lauper getting inducted. When you write and record a song like “Time After Time,” a song covered by Willie Nelson, Miles Davis, and over 400 other artists, you are richly deserving of the honor. (It should have happened in 2023, when Lauper was first nominated, but we’ll let that go.)

“Time After Time” (co-written with Rob Hyman) is just one of Lauper’s many achievements. In fact, the song is not even her best-seller–that’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Nor is it the song of hers I like best–that would be “All Through the Night.” But it’s “Time After Time” that looms largest in her catalog, and that’s because it has entered the American Songbook.

Now that’s a true honor. Sales figures and popularity polls don’t get you into the American Songbook. There’s no selection committee involved. A song like “Time After Time” becomes a standard only gradually, after thousands of musicians decide individually it’s a song they want to play. Jazz singers, folk artists, pop stars, rockers, even bluegrass banjo pickers have added the song to their set lists, and to their albums. Pros and semi-pros have played it at countless wedding parties, and amateurs have played it at countless more open mics and karaoke nights.

For a song that was recorded almost as an afterthought (the label insisted the album was one track short), “Time After Time” has done pretty well for itself. It was nominated for, but did not win, the Grammy award for Song of the Year. The winner that year was Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” and that was almost certainly the right call in 1985. But in all the decades since, “What’s Love Got to Do With It” has been covered only 40 times, compared to over 400 covers of “Time After Time.” Songs move through the culture in mysterious ways.

Here are five adaptations of Lauper’s signature song (or one of her signature songs). Each one is worth a second listen as we ponder what makes “Time After Time” impervious to time itself.
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