f this were the late 80’s/early 90’s, MTV still mattered an played videos while having a Buzz Bin, then “Skeletons”, the title track off of Tiny Masters of Today new album, would have been a huge hit.
Growing up in South Africa, trumpet player Hugh Masekela used music as an act of defiance against apartheid. He went into exile in New York City in the 1960s, recorded a number one hit (“Grazing in the Grass”) and watched Jim Crow and segregation crumble in America. He married the South African singing legend Miriam Makeba and returned to South Africa to play with Paul Simon on the “Graceland” tour. He watched apartheid crumble, writing music for Nelson Mandela. In between, he toured the world many times while making music that can be searing, romantic, political and joyful all at once.
While his band, Minibar, is on hiatus, Simon Petty has resurfaced, recording under the alias Solomon’s Seal. His solo offering, The Sea, The Sea, is a collection of mostly delicate acoustic tunes that tug at the soul and bring a sense of wonder.
The Dead Weather are set to perform a set at a ‘pop-up’ record store which will open for two days only this week on the Lower East Side in New
Bruce Springsteen has added a string of dates to his upcoming tour of the US, which includes the final live shows at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. Four of the
We’re on day two of the Carrie Brownstein/Monitor Mix Phish experiment in which the Queen blogger and former guitarist/vocalist for Sleater-Kinney tries to see why people flock to see the
As was the case last year, NPR Music will broadcast live from George Wein’s Folk Festival 50 – aka Newport Folk Festival – and CareFusion Jazz Festival 55 – aka
You Can’t Always Get What You Want is the closing track on the 1969 Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed. Regular readers may remember we did our first Stones song edition of Cover Wars two months ago when we took a look at covers of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.
There are some very interesting quotes regarding the drumming on this track included in the book According to the Rolling Stones,
THE CONTESTANTS:
Aretha Franklin: This cover comes off a 1981 Aretha Franklin album that universally gets bad to lukewarm reviews. The arrangement is very 80’s. Still, it’s worth a couple minutes to hear the Queen Of Soul sing lead on this tune. Source: Love All The Hurt Away
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/cantaretha.mp3]READ ON to hear the rest of this week’s Cover Wars contestants…
Wilco’s a peculiar musical addiction: most of their songs don’t quite bowl you over as much as sneak up on you, and you’re hooked long before you know it. On what, exactly? It’s different for everyone, but is some variation on songs and a core sound that are an uneasily balanced dichotomy: pastoral melodies that give way to apocalyptic sounding guitar squalls; plangent pop and alt-country tunes that find themselves torn open to reveal molten jams and psychedelic cores churning beneath. Jeff Tweedy seems to wear all that on his face: a goofy grin has a way of morphing into a teeth-baring growl, a bemused smile into a terrified caterwaul. His band mates seem like nice enough chaps. They also give no quarter when there’s rocking to be done.
You Never Know – Wilco w/ Feist and Ed Droste
Wilco (The Album)
I maintain – and it’s hardly a unique opinion – that hiring Nels Cline is the best decision Tweedy’s ever made. Cline plays guitar as if it’s an extension of a seizure, his arms and torso shaking as he peels off fuzzy, sheety sounds and hot-toned blasts of guitar noise, dismantling Wilco delicacies like Handshake Drugs and Impossible Germany and forcing them into oblivion, with the rest of the band by now well aware of when to follow him down the rabbit hole. At Keyspan, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, especially, was as animated as I’ve ever seen him, tucking all sorts of filigree in behind Cline’s machinations. Tweedy himself was playful and mischievous, spinning his microphone chord, stalking around the stage and making warm banter with a crowd that awoke sometime around that “Germany” and from that point kept up its end, too.
READ ON for more of Chad’s thoughts on Wilco at Keyspan Park…
Rodriguez – Inner City Blues
