Funeral to Finish

  Listening to this album again (an absolute joy, btw, I was almost laughing at how good some of these songs are), I was struck by the number of specific places Lucinda Williams mentions.  Just in the song "Jackson" alone, the final track on the album, she mentions Lafayette, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg, and finally Jackson (obviously Jackson, Mississippi).  That's not even the only song titled after a place - there's also a song called "Greenville," which could be any Greenville because every Southern state (maybe every state, I don't know) has a Greenville (a fact immortalized by R.E.M. in their song "Little America" - "another Greenville/another Magic Mart," but we're getting off-topic), and a song called "Lake Charles," and on and on. As the cover and the title and the overall mood suggests, this is an album rooted in the South and the particular connection of Southerners to the land, connected  to it but also itinerant u...

  Taylor Swift releases so many albums that this was like EIGHT albums ago, and it's from 2012!  She has another one coming out in a month!  Taylor Swift was put on this Earth to make everyone who's even moderately lazy feel like a huge loser.  Or maybe that's just me. Taylor Swift is so motivated that she RE-RECORDED this album and released a new version last year, so she could sell her own version instead of the masters that had been sold to an evil holding company.  (This review will be about the original version, since that's the one on the list).   So as most everybody knows, this is the album where Swift left country behind and starting branching out into more pop and electronica-influenced stuff.  There are still some songs with pedal steel and gently strummed acoustics and the other indicia of country music but this is certainly not a Country Music Album.  There are some good songs ("22," "Starlight," "Stay Stay Stay"), some great s...

  Let's get this out of the way right off the top: this cover art for this album is so hilariously godawful that I think it's part of the reason why I instinctively disliked the record for a long time.  I mean, look at it.  Just horrible.  OK. Remember The Big Chill ?  It was an 80s thing, a movie about people who had gone to college together in the 60s and then had a reunion of sorts when one of the group killed himself.  (The suicide victim was played by Kevin Costner but his scenes were cut from the final version.)  So it came out in 1983, meaning that if it came out today, the characters would have all been in college together around, say, 2007.  Which means that instead of "The Weight" from this album appearing on the soundtrack, it would be something like "Buy U a Drank" by T-Pain or "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne. Anyway, this super important album was born out of lengthy songwriting and jam sessions with the members of the Band and Dylan at...

  I guess there's a Led Zeppelin album for every type of stoner and this is not my Led Zeppelin album.  It's mostly a sludgy, plodding trudge through a bunch of recycled blues riffs and listening to Robert Plant start to develop his yowl.  It's a snooze but the kids used to love it. Hey, do you think Zep would have been as big a success if they had kept their original name, "The New Yardbirds"?  It doesn't really sing, does it.  By the time this album was recorded, Jimmy Page was already famous for his work in the Old Yardbirds, and he and manager Peter Grant fronted the 1700+ pounds to pay for the studio time.  The band had already been playing together for a while, so the recording only took something like nine total days. Lyrically, it's not inspiring.  The songs fall into three main categories: (1) you left me, and that makes me sad; (2) I plan to leave you, or I am in the process of leaving you, and that cheers me; and (3) I like to fuck. (1) - "...

  I'm not sure what the first Clash song I heard was, but it was probably something like "Train In Vain" or "Rock the Casbah" or something else from Combat Rock that would have been on mainstream radio in the early 80's.  (This was early in my musical life, when I was still into Pink Floyd and Rush and your standard suburban angsty teen stuff.)  And then I read about the Clash being "punk" and I was like "What?  That isn't punk."  By this point, I had stumbled across the Sex Pistols which not unreasonably defined what punk was for me, and the Clash songs I heard on the radio didn't sound like that. Ladies and gentlemen, the Clash are most definitely punk, and this album, released a few months before Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols , is as good a punk album - or rock album, for that matter -  as was ever made.  Maybe it's not "the greatest rock and roll album ever manufactured anywhere," as Robert...

  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip...

  I have a long-running joke, or maybe not such a joke, with my friends that the Stones' "Monkey Man," which is on Let It Bleed , an album we will most assuredly see at some point, isn't just a great rock song, but objectively the greatest rock and roll song of all time .  I have literally convinced people that this is true!  But you know what?  There is more than one song on this album that could also be the greatest rock song of all time. Recorded mostly in 1970 at the height of the band's powers, this is not just one of the Rolling Stones' best albums; it's one of the best albums of all time, and should probably be much higher on the list.  After the untimely death of Brian Jones (or was it..... muhhhhhduhhhh ), the Stones left behind their dalliances with psychedelia and chamber pop and leaned into Americana roots-rock.  Keith Richards, who always idolized the Mississippi blues, really came into his own on this album.  The very first thing you hear...