I posted about Ashley back on June 20th (link to post). She it an amazing country singer and a great young songwriter. Tonight’s Sunday Session is from the National Public Radio (NPR) Tiny Desk concert series. Ashley performs three songs accompanied by an acoustic guitar. It’s really good stuff and I think you will enjoy it…….
I’ve been dreaming a lot about rivers lately. Yeah I know that probably sounds strange but what can I say. These dreams have made me realize that a river is an incredible metaphor for our lives.
I know that I’m not the first person to have such thoughts and dreams about rivers. I’m pretty sure that Pete Townshend must have had similar thoughts when he wrote his amazing song, A Sea Refuses No River.
Please don’t think I’m trying to influence what you believe……I just want to make you think……
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it in this blog but I love Formula One and Indycar open wheel auto racing. My two racing heroes, Aryton Senna and Michael Andretti, actually tell you a lot about me and how I approach life and work.
Michael drove the wheels off of race cars, sometimes literally, because as a driver he only knew one speed……full throttle. He still holds the record for leading the most laps of the Indy 500 without ever winning the race. If he would have taken better care of his cars, he might have won multiple Indy 500s but my, my, my he was wicked fast (until his cars blew up). Watch the following clip from the 1992 Indy 500 and you’ll l see what I mean. (The start of the race is about 17 minutes into the clip.) Michael qualified 6th (on the outside of the second row) and if you watch closely you will see him go from the outside to the inside and around the leader by the first turn. Absolutely amazing. I was there to see it in person and it was a performance I’ll never forget…….
Michael ended up leading 160 laps of that race but his car broke 10 laps before the end. Like I said….wicked fast as long as his car was running.
Aryton Senna was arguably the greatest race car driver of all time. He was, is, and always will be a hero for me. The man was incredible in a race car and an absolute magician in the rain. Watch this clip from the 1993 Formula One race at Donnington Park. In wet conditions that were absolutely atrocious you can observe Senna go from fifth to first within a few corners into the race. This first lap performance may be the best single race lap of all time.
Senna won the race and had lapped all but the second place car by the end of it. It was a stunning performance but only one of many similar performance in his career.
You are probably asking yourself what’s the link between me and these racing legends? The answer is that in life I only know one speed….full throttle. I firmly believe that if something is worth doing it’s worth throwing yourself into 110%. I work hard, harder than just about anyone that I know. Not bragging, it’s just a fact. My equipment (in this case it’s my body and not a race car) might wear out before the natural end of my race but by God I’m running full throttle until that happens.
Two of my musical heroes produced songs that helped shape my approach to life. To close out this post let me share those songs with you.
First up, Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen. The message of this song is pretty self evident so let’s listen to it without any further explanation.
Next up, My My Hey Hey (both the Out of the Blue and the Into the Black versions), by Neil Young. The two versions of this song are absolutely brilliant and capture the way I feel about life in a couple of key lines:
It’s better to burn out than to fade away
It’s better to burn out that to rust
It’s better to burn out cause rust never sleeps
I firmly believe that if I move fast enough the rust will never catch me……burning out, well that’s probably something that can’t be avoided. Let’s listen to both versions…..
Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. On this day we traditionally reflect on the things for which we are thankful. The following are some of the big things that I am thankful for today.
To celebrate Thanksgiving I offer up this wonderful Thanksgiving song from Mary Chapin Carpenter, one of my favorite singer/songwriters.
Got an email from Bruce yesterday about a new album that he’s releasing early next year. Here’s what he had to say about it…..
I was working on a record of some of our best unreleased material from the past decade when Tom Morello (sitting in for Steve during the Australian leg of our tour) suggested we ought to add “High Hopes” to our live set. I had cut “High Hopes,” a song by Tim Scott McConnell of the LA based Havalinas, in the 90′s. We worked it up in our Aussie rehearsals and Tom then proceeded to burn the house down with it. We re-cut it mid tour at Studios 301 in Sydney along with “Just Like Fire Would,” a song from one of my favorite early Australian punk bands, The Saints (check out “I’m Stranded”). Tom and his guitar became my muse, pushing the rest of this project to another level. Thanks for the inspiration Tom.
Some of these songs, “American Skin” and “Ghost of Tom Joad,” you’ll be familiar with from our live versions. I felt they were among the best of my writing and deserved a proper studio recording. ”The Wall” is something I’d played on stage a few times and remains very close to my heart. The title and idea were Joe Grushecky’s, then the song appeared after Patti and I made a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. It was inspired by my memories of Walter Cichon. Walter was one of the great early Jersey Shore rockers, who along with his brother Ray (one of my early guitar mentors) led the ”Motifs”. The Motifs were a local rock band who were always a head above everybody else. Raw, sexy and rebellious, they were the heroes you aspired to be. But these were heroes you could touch, speak to, and go to with your musical inquiries. Cool, but always accessible, they were an inspiration to me, and many young working musicians in 1960′s central New Jersey. Though my character in “The Wall” is a Marine, Walter was actually in the Army, A Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry. He was the first person I ever stood in the presence of who was filled with the mystique of the true rock star. Walter went missing in action in Vietnam in March 1968. He still performs somewhat regularly in my mind, the way he stood, dressed, held the tambourine, the casual cool, the freeness. The man who by his attitude, his walk said “you can defy all this, all of what’s here, all of what you’ve been taught, taught to fear, to love and you’ll still be alright.” His was a terrible loss to us, his loved ones and the local music scene. I still miss him.
This is music I always felt needed to be released. From the gangsters of “Harry’s Place,” the ill-prepared roomies on “Frankie Fell In Love” (shades of Steve and I bumming together in our Asbury Park apartment) the travelers in the wasteland of “Hunter Of Invisible Game,” to the soldier and his visiting friend in “The Wall”, I felt they all deserved a home and a hearing.
Hope you enjoy it,
Bruce Springsteen
Let’s listen to the album’s title track……
It’s a little bit of a different sound…can’t wait to check out the rest of the album next year. I’m really looking forward to hearing his studio version of The Wall. Here is a rare live performance of the song from back in 2005….
While we’re waiting for the new album, here’s a bonus performance of Secret Garden from Bruce’s stop in Leeds this year. It’s one of my favorite songs and it really sounds great here….
I love this man and his music!
I have a special treat for you today. A great documentary about, Jefferson Airplane, the best of the San Francisco bands from the 1960s. This is true rock history, some amazing rock music, and a chance to observe the beautiful and talented Grace Slick in her prime. Enjoy……
Here’s a set of Linda’s favorite songs from an HBO TV special in 1980. This set makes you appreciate Linda’s incredible voice and mourn the fact that she is no longer able to sing. Enjoy…..
I was lucky enough to see Linda in concert in the early 1970 and it was an experience I will never forget.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was reading Simple Dreams by Linda Ronstadt. I have enjoyed the book and the behind the scenes stories that it contains. A great example of those stories is Linda’s description of working with Brian Wilson who I think is one of the great musical geniuses of our generation. Like all geniuses, Brian is a little eccentric and Linda captures that perfectly in the following story extracted from Simple Dreams……
When Peter Asher and I began to record the Cry Like a Rainbow album, our best collaboration, in my opinion. Jimmy (Webb) wrote an orchestral arrangement for me of his wistful song “Adios,” with Brian Wilson singing the complex backing harmonies. I had known Brian Wilson briefly in my Troubadour days, when he was separated for a time from his first wife. He was always sweet and friendly, and never pressed any romantic agenda. Several times I discovered him at my back door, studying a little pile of coins he held in his hand, which he said was ten or fifteen cents shy of the price for a bottle of grape juice. He said it was important for him to drink grape juice in order to solve some health problem that was troubling him. I would provide the remaining ten or fifteen cents, and we would climb into his huge convertible with the top always down, the back stuffed with a sizable accumulation of Brian’s dirty laundry. As a bachelor, he seemed to have difficulty coping with domestic arrangements, so I would suggest a trip to the Laundromat, where we would fill an entire row of machines. (I had a lot of quarters.) Afterward we would sit in my living room, drink the grape juice, and listen to my small collection of Phil Spector records. Brian really liked Phil Spector.
In the studio, under Brian’s direction, we recorded his harmony parts for “Adios” with five separate tracks of unison singing on each of the three parts, fifteen vocal tracks in all. He didn’t seem concerned if some of the tracks veered slightly out of tune, but took advantage of the slight “chorused” effect it created when he came back into the control room to mix the harmony tracks into the creamy vocal smoothness instantly recognizable as the Beach Boys.
Brian was making up the harmonies as he went along, but sometimes, when he was having difficulty figuring out a complicated section, he would scold himself and say that he needed to work for a time at the piano. However, when he sat down at the piano, he never played any part of “Adios,” but instead would play a boogie-woogie song, very loud in a different key. After a few minutes of this he would go back to the microphone and sing the parts perfectly, without a trace of hesitation.
Let’s listen to the results of that collaboration……
A great Jimmy Webb song, a beautiful vocal by Linda, and unbelievable harmonies from Brian…..it doesn’t get any better than this! If you are a Linda fan I encourage you to pickup Simple Dreams, you will really enjoy it.
I, like most people in my generation, remember exactly where I was 50 years ago today when President John F Kennedy was assassinated. My dad was attending a conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on that day and had taken me out of school to accompany him on the trip. I was in a hotel room with another 10 year old when word of the events of that day was announced on television. The following is exactly what we heard.
I will never forget Walter Cronkite’s visible emotion when making the announcement. To be honest, neither of us was mature enough to have a full appreciation of the events but we understood enough to know that the world, and especially the US, had changed in some fundamental way.
The song that best captures that moment from 50 years ago is one that you have probably never heard. Beat Avenue by Eric Andersen is an amazing 26 minute epic description of his day among the beat generation in San Francisco on that day. The best way that any of us can honor President Kennedy is to listen to this song and reflect on why we, the human race, still have to deal with such events 5o years after this tragedy.
RIP President Kennedy!
Today’s post features Typhoon, a band out of Portland that been around for a while but are just now starting to hit their stride (in my humble opinion). This large (eleven member) band has an amazing sound which provides the perfect backing for lead singer Kyle Morton’s songs. Typhoon is high on my list of new music finds for this year and I think you will like them as well! Let’s listen to a great set they recently recorded at KEXP……
Want to hear a little more? Me too…..here’s a song from their new CD, White Lighter……
Typhoon is going to be big and I hope you remember that you heard them here first 🙂
