All posts by Egil

Leonard Cohen: Popular Problems

leonard cohen popular problems

At the age of 80, Leonard Cohen has created a masterpiece. It’s a smoky, late-night concoction delivered with a deceptively light touch that masks deep seriousness.
~Neil McCormick (The Telegraph)

There’s only been one other album this year that’s hit me this hard in the gut: Rosanne Cash’s “The River & The Thread”.

Cohen’s recent album feels like a masterpiece, but I’ve only listened to it for two weeks. It needs to sink in, and by the end of the year (end year lists) we’ll see how it holds up. But for now.. Holy shit! This is wonderful music, must be his best since the brilliant “The Future” (1992).

My Favorite songs so far: Did I ever Love You, Almost Like The Blues, My Oh My,  & Slow.

The lemon trees blossom
The almond trees whither
It’s Spring and it’s Summer
And it’s Winter forever

Did I ever love you
Does it really matter
Did I ever fight you
You don’t need to answer

Did I Ever Love You:

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Bob Dylan: Mercy On Us (Oh Mercy outtakes)

MercyOnUs-front

Since we just posted: Bob Dylan: Infidels outtakes (Rough cuts) it feels right to get this post flying as well.

Great outtakes from the “Oh Mercy” sessions.

The Studio
New Orleans, Louisiana
7-29 March 1989

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Los Lobos: covering Dylan’s “Billy 1” & “On A Night Like This”

Los Lobos

Happy birthday David Hidalgo -> October 6: David Hidalgo is 60 Happy Birthday

Here are Los Lobos with 2 great Dylan covers: “Billy 1” & “On A Night Like This”

Billy 1:

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Bob Dylan: Infidels outtakes (Rough cuts)

Bob Dylan - Rough Cuts (Infidels Studio Sessions) - Front

 For the first time in his career, Dylan books a month of sessions to record an album. The sessions will take place at the Power Station in New York, across the way from Sony Studios. Dylan coproduces the album with Mark Knopfler. The band they have devised for the sessions ranks as one of his most inspired gatherings. The rhythm section is Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. The two-pronged guitar attack is to be provided by Knopfler and ex-Stones axeman Mick Taylor. Keyboardist Alan Clark has been enlisted from Knopfler’s band. The sessions result in 16 original new songs, 14 cover versions, and a couple of instrumentals (copyrighted under the titles, “Dark Groove” and “Don’t Fly Unless It’s Safe”).
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)

Here we have some brilliant outtakes from the Infidels sessions. Most importantly the electric versions of “Blind Willie McTell”.

Studio A
Power Station
New York City, New York
April 11 – May 17.

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Bob Dylan’s best songs: You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

Verlaine & Rimbaud
“Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud”

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud
But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go
~Bob Dylan (You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)

Much of the song is thus delivered, so lightly as to suggest that it’s in brackets, with the same sparkling, generous humour. Astonishing that a man who, by the time he made this album, had been monstrously famous for over a decade and had been acclaimed as a genius before he was 25, could have the down-to-earth self-knowledge to
throw out, in this song, so ordinarily humorous and puckish a phrase as the one that ends this stanza: ‘You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m doin’ / Stayin’ far behind without you / You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m sayin’— / You’re gonna make me give myself a good talkin’ to . . .’
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)

And how smoothly the album slips from this orgy of marital upchuck into the lightest, most innocent, most enticing love song of the whole batch, a throwaway which on closer inspection seems quite as brilliant (in composition and performance) as anything else here: “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” So clever, so perfect, to have a song that puts any separation squarely in the future, instead of present, near past, or distant past.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986)

Grooveshark:
You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Spotify:

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