Wow, loved the reference to
High Fidelity, I haven’t watched that movie in so long... I bought it off iTunes, must have it archived someplace if it’s not still re-downloadable.
It's the rare book that made its way to film with its spirit fully in tact -- despite a complete change of continent! My main gripe when it came out was one of the most memorable scenes in the book was cut. Fortunately, though it wasn't in the film (presumably for pacing), they did shoot it and include it on the DVD. Not sure if it is in the digital download version, but thankfully YouTube don't care:
And yah, of course I remember making mix tapes back when iTunes wasn’t even imagined. My cars are always ancient beasts, so even after I had iTunes and CD players in the house, I’d end up mixing a playlist to launch from an iPod via FM transmitter in the car, or else I’d burn the list to CD and then make a cassette tape using a boombox w/ CD and tape capability.
I recently bought a Bluetooth transmitter that plugs into the AUX in my mother's car so she could listen to her Amazon Prime music (which I had to setup and create a playlist of songs I know she loves) through her car speakers. It was important it be easy to use and work seamlessly with Google Maps on her iPhone since she just took her first solo long drive (5 hours to New York). It worked like a charm. Now, on my trip overseas, I need to figure out a solution for my sister's car, which may have an aftermarket AUX but I'm not sure. If not, hopefully I can find an FM transmitter out in that desert!
Sure is easier with iTunes than with a pencil, paper, a bunch of home-brew radio tapes and a fresh one to stick the final decision onto (assuming i added up the timings right and everything I went for actually fit).
Ain't it just? I remember the painstaking process when you realize you forgot a song or discovered a better sequence. What could be a 45 minute exercise in dubbing is now a two second exercise in click'n'drag. Well, sometimes it's 20 seconds since iTunes
despises large libraries on external drives.
Peyroux is terrific. I've ended up collecting tracks from more than a few of her albums. Great voice, range, diction, ear, sense of timing, manages to put them together in a way that lets studio tracks sound unrehearsed, which is not simple.
That captures what puts her above others for me: "diction, ear and sense timing." Together it makes it so that covers, like the excellent Cohen cover you posted, both hew to the original's characteristics but is melded to her strengths. So many interpreters simply slow a tempo to a crawl or add vocal filigrees that undercut any immediacy or intimacy of the originals in favor of superfluous stylings. She doesn't do that.
First things I heard of hers were from the Bare Bones album. My niece popped the CD in to entertain us while she was cooking. I wanted to steal the thing after hearing a few tracks... this is Damn the Circumstances from that album.
Nice! I only sampled it. Came home an hour ago with a few new purchases (detailed at the bottom of this post). They're now in iTunes, on my iPhone and in Google's cloud -- so I can kick back and enjoy on this, one of my last two nights until August with a real stereo.
Is it too much to propose she has what it takes to cover Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love? She’s brave to pick up the dare and I think manages to deliver on it.
This is one of the first songs I heard her perform. Is it from the
Careless Love album? I'm too lazy to check. That's the only one I have in full, though I have a smattering of others.
The thing is, I do often enough prefer studio sessions because they’re usually engineered for good balance, and you can hear the lyrics (well that’s a big maybe any more with some bands). But I do scout around for live tracks, and once in awhile I run into something that, as you said, may have its assortment of flaws, but the performance is powerful enough that it either doesn't matter or the flaws enhance the overall effect.
No doubt. It's not that I'm anti-studio at all. Just that I see great value in the other, much rarer aesthetic. So rare, in fact, that I think I'm more instantaneously drawn in. At least with more stripped down music. Not a big fan of sloppy "rock" or live concerts. As you wisely point out, the balance is usually sacrificed, anachronistic overdubs can be more easily spotted and the performances are usually geared towards that audience, not living rooms.
I’m not one of the people who roundly dissed Nouvelle Vague for being kitschy or mocked their idea of reviving new wave using singers who’d never heard the originals, so I had enjoyed some of their offerings, including a studio take on In a Manner of Speaking. I had first heard the track when it ran under the closing credits of A Mighty Heart. It has been used in at least one other film as well.
I love some kitsch. This is now in my "Watch Later" YouTube queue. Hopefully tomorrow.
But when I ran into a video of a live performance of that track in Portugal, from when Mélanie Pain was still with the band, I was really taken by it. She sometimes hesitates and then half-speaks the lyrics instead of singing them, or extends a beat as if to underscore the pain of having to say something for which there probably are no right words.
Isn't that a beautiful thing? The first album where I encountered it was, of all things a studio album produced by Daniel Lanois, who's known for perfectionism. In 1995, he recorded
Wrecking Ball with Emmylou Harris. It's a pretty incredible album that's a coherent song cycle despite being nearly all covers. Anyway, her vocals were recorded live in the studio with the basic band. She's no slouch when it comes to controlling her voice and she has strong mic technique, and yet in this recording she often sounds like she backs away from the microphone. When I first heard it, some of those trailing phrases and the voice -- once too gossamer for my taste, had this emotive, worn-in character -- hypnotized me. I must've listened to the album two dozen times before even thinking about the lyrics or looking in the lyric book. I just wanted that mood. I'm always on the hunt for more of that. It seems it most likely has to be done accidentally.
There are other live performance videos of the same track, where Mélanie Pain was still the vocalist, but in a lot of them it felt to me like she was no longer really able to be in that place of discovering the song for the audience even as she was singing it.
Also queued. I can smell dinner. Time to enjoy the stereo.
Sometimes the value of a studio track is that it was very fresh too once, even if behind it lay 54 rejected takes. The preserved in amber effect... and once in awhile those are a better bet than a live video from a weary stop #11 on a long tour. The trick for artists and producers is to figure out how to sound fresh and “live” in take #55 back home.
Absolutely. That goes for stuff captured serendipitously fast or that was toiled over for 100+ takes (I'm looking at you,
"White Album". Reading random accounts of magic and drudgery in the studio can be fascinating.
Okay. Time to stuff my head until the food falls into my stomach.
I've finally caught up with 1997. Today I spontaneously splurged on the 20th anniversary reissue of Radiohead's
OK Computer, an album I've never owned. The 2-disc version includes a number of b-sides and four unreleased contemporaneous tracks. I've tried to find reviews of the sonics first but finally gave up. After reading several reviews today I discovered that Bob Ludwig did the remaster, though, so I'm satisfied. Looking forward to it. In the process, I learned that there's a live version of "Exit Music (for a Film)" on one of the pricy iterations of this release. I checked Google Play, but they don't have it. In the process, I saw that Amanda Palmer (wife of Neil Gaiman) recorded an EP of Radiohead covers including that song. I headed over to Bandcamp to see if they have it in lossless. Indeed, they do, and for a "name your own price" ($1+). I dropped a couple shekels in her tip jar, now I'm off to the races. It should be a fun night. I mean, I hear Radiohead's full of sunshine and lollipops!
