“Living Of Love”

For just one chance to find
Love was someone that you loved to find
For just the sense to try
To walk ahead and leave the pain behind
If the days aren’t easy and the nights are rough
When they ask you what you’re thinking of
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love

Your heart says not again
What kind of mess have you got me in
But when the feelings there
It can lift you up and take you anywhere
But the gravel beneath you and the limbs above
If anybody asks you where your coming from
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love

Say yes we live uncertainty
And disappointments have to be
And everyday we might be facing more
And yes we live in desperate times
But fading words and shaking rhymes
There’s only one thing here worth hoping for
With Lucifer beneath you and God above
If either one of them asks you what your living of
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love

Everything surrounding “Once” which I wrote about back in July.

“Falling Slowly”

On the musical commentary section of the DVD the director compares this song to the sexual dance of foreplay and consumation, The first chorus is the first kiss. By the end of the song they are “****ing like animals”. An odd assessment given the chaste nature of both characters. Still, you can hear it in there can’t you?

A wisp of a movie that allows you to be both hopeful and realistic - a rare combination these days. It’s now out on DVD so if you haven’t seen it - do yourself a favor and rent it. Roger Ebert review.

Here’s Glen doing a blow your doors off version of “Astral Weeks”

We wrote about Victoria previously.

Back in Boston in the late 80’s early 90’s my friends Todd and Brian struggled to do what musicians all over do - “make it”. In fact, they had some success signing with Enigma as “The Cavedogs” and releasing some very cool power pop inspired rock music.

Behold the power of the Internet as I searched for their Yuletime song that I remembered with half my brain and was able to find just a few minutes later.

Cavedogs - “3 Wise Men And A Baby” (via ColourMeImpressed)

Download the song

Twenty years ago The Cowboy Junkies recorded “The Trinity Sessions” in Toronto, ON. One microphone, direct to tape - the atmospheric vocals and sparse instrumentation were the perfect setting for Margo’s voice and the low moan of the guitars.

Earlier in the summer 1987 I met M. and R. in Salzburg, Austria at a hostel whose gimmick was to play “The Sound of Music” 24 hours a day in the lobby for ironically inclined backpackers from around the globe. We climbed the hills where Maria sang cheesy songs and wandered through the settings so familiar to the movie. Both R. and M. ended up in Toronto later that year. R. entered law school at York and M. followed her sister to the hipper environs of Toronto and away from their Edmonton home.

We saw the Cowboy Junkies on a cold December day just a few weeks after they recorded the record at a location I’ll never remember. Suffice it to say that at that point in their career very few people outside Toronto were clued in to what the Junkies were up to. The show was mesmerizing - quiet, intense and exhilarating all at the same time. I remember wondering who else could play that slow and yet include so much emotion in the spaces between the notes.

I dreamed of moving to Canada where people were friendlier and didn’t move in the same harried circles of imagined hipness that most of my friends did. There was a trust and openness that I could scarcely imagine among those who I knew who lived there at the time and I pictured myself as part of it. It wasn’t to be. I ended up living on the coast of Maine which, in fairness, had it’s own share of pleasures. In July of 1989 I was sitting on my back porch watching the sunset over the Penobscot Bay when I got the call. R. had been hit by car while riding her bicycle and had died in the hospital a few hours later.

Stunned and in between gasps of silence I put “The Trinity Sessions” on the stereo and drank my sorrow into oblivion - sitting alone and working out the emotions. I have been mostly unable to play the record again. It’s been twenty years though, twenty years. When critics complain “why did someone bother recording song xyz again” they have their reasons for not wanting to listen to a different version - a different musical thought process. I have mine too.

“Sweet Jane”

“Misguided Angel”

Trinity Revisited - Ryan Adams, Natalie Merchant etc.

From the WTMD blog

Image via Dino Perrucci Photography

James Brown, ‘Sex Machine’

The Band, ‘The Basement Tapes’

Bob Dylan, ‘Blood on the Tracks

Rolling Stones, ‘Sticky Fingers’

Led Zeppelin, ‘Led Zeppelin IV’

Neil Young and Crazy Horse, ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”

The Who, ‘Who’s Next’

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass’

Radiohead, ‘The Bends’

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, ‘Time the Revelator’

Not too surprising although the Radiohead threw me for a loop. I’m partial to “Exile On Main Street” over Sticky Fingers

“The Victorian freak show never went away,” Millman rails in a soliloquy that serves as a climax of the “Extras” final episode and a moment of redemption for the character, whose life and friendships have been corrupted by fame. “Now it’s called ‘Big Brother’ or ‘American Idol,’ where in the preliminary rounds we wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multimillionaires.”

To the networks, he says: “You can’t wash your hands of this. You can’t keep going, ‘Oh, it’s exploitation, but it’s what the public wants.’ No.”

To the audience watching at home, he says: “Shame on you. And shame on me. I’m the worst of all. Cause I’m one of these people that goes, ‘I’m an entertainer, it’s in my blood.’ Yeah, it’s in my blood because a real job’s too hard.”

I don’t think so. Ricky Gervais on celebrity culture. If you haven’t seen “Extras” you’ve been missing some great TV.

Continue reading ‘is he having a laugh?’

Jack Black as McCartney? Pathetic - still, funny. Plus - Jenna Fischer! Yowza, put this one on the fake girlfriend list.

Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story

Cat Power in the Studio via Matador Records.

A recent cover you might recognize mama.

Plus, The New Yorker does a writeup

The album’s highlight is Marshall’s version of James Brown’s “Lost Someone,” a slow dance that she allows to build to a peak without ever overreaching or trying to shout herself out of the heartbreak. “Never go to strangers, come on home to me,” she chants, first in a low murmur and later in a cry, neither particularly anguished. Marshall could not have conquered a song this blunt and desperate in her youth. But, now that she knows better who she is, perhaps she’s less afraid of losing herself.